The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (20 page)

On the opposite side of the house, the living room fronts on a spectacular canyon view, breaking open with glass walls and a deep porch, recessed, however, to keep the taut wall line and provide shelter in any weather. Most striking of all is what has happened to the hipped roof, made unfamiliar by an oversized monitor skylight which creates a silhouette like a farmer’s broad-brimmed hat.

Composite ranches feature irregular perimeter outlines. Thus they are characterized by degrees of irregular massing with L- and T-shapes the most prevalent forms.... Like other ranches, roofs are low-pitched except that multiple-gables, multiple-hip, and combined gable and hip roofs predominate.

The suffused light I had detected seconds before goes out in a flicker, while a second, brighter alpenglow leaks through three sets of wooden shutters. There is no glass. I stare at a room unlike any I have seen. Thirty feet above the ground floor, mountain views all around. Crafted with fancy handiwork, Tibetan dragons, filigree, and crenelation.

The ceiling design is in large coffered bays corresponding to the buttresses, which are emphasized by the
pietra
serena pilasters resting on a string-course above the tops of the desks and supporting a narrow architrave below the ceiling.

The light of this southern fjord is not unlike the light of the Baltic; a pallid freshness is common to both cities; sitting snugly out of the sunlight in Sydney’s Strand Arcade, all fancy balustrades and tesselated paving, sometimes I almost expect to see the shoppers shaking the snow from their galoshes, breathing in their hands to restore the circulation and ordering themselves a schnapps.

The flat roofs, azoteas, were protected by stone parapets, so that every house was a fortress. Sometimes these roofs resembled parterres of flowers, so thickly were they covered with them, but more frequently these were cultivated in broad terraced gardens, laid out between the edifices. Occasionally a great square or marketplace intervened, surrounded by its porticos of stone and stucco; or a pyramidal temple reared its colossal bulk, crowned with its tapering sanctuaries, and altars blazing with inextinguishable fires. The great street facing the southern causeway, unlike most others in the place, was wide, and extended some miles in nearly a straight line, as before noticed, through the centre of the city.

Keen to secure some photographs, I scaled the bank and climbed between the tensioned strands of the fence in sight on my right as I fought my way along the edge of the plantation for what I estimated to be about two hundred yards on a course roughly parallel to the road.

The next morning we cross over a notch and wind out way through thick fog across a suspension bridge that spans a fulminant torrent.

The houses that adjoined this row of shops were small terraced cottages with front doors that opened straight into the front rooms, and a bare yard of space between the windows and the pavement. Their own house, though not much bigger, was more modern and semi-detached, with a pebble-dash facade and some decorative woodwork which his father, like their neighbours, kept brightly painted in two colours, green and cream.

Imagine to yourself, my dear Letty, a spacious garden, part laid out in delightful walks, bounded with high hedges and trees, and paved with gravel; part exhibiting a wonderful assemblage of the most picturesque and striking objects, pavilions, lodges, groves, grottoes, lawns, temples and cascades ; porticoes, colonades [sic], and rotundos; adorned with pillars, statues, and painting....

It is one of two evidently designed by the same architect who built some houses in a characteristic taste on Beacon Street opposite the Common. It has a wooden portico, with slender fluted columns, which have always been painted white, and which, with the delicate moldings of the cornice, form the sole and efficient decoration of the street front; nothing could be simpler, and nothing could be better.

The pretty Queen Anne house, with its pitted rosy-red bricks and its blunted grey stonework, stretched its bland length with a certain luxuriant confidence, surrendering itself to the garden whose proportions were perfectly attuned to its own. IRIS MURDOCH,
An Unofficial Rose

It was long and low built, with a pillared veranda and balcony all the way round. The soft white bulk of it lay stretched upon the green garden like a sleeping beast.

... I escaped to the open country and fearfully took refuge in a low hovel, quite bare, and making a wretched appearance after the palaces I had beheld in the village. This hovel, however, joined a cottage of a neat and pleasant appearance, but after my late dearly bought experience, I dared not enter it. MARY SHELLEY,
Frankenstein

It was in shape oblong, about 80 feet by 40, unmistakably ecclesiastical in feeling—two rows of wooden pillars, spaced at intervals of fifteen feet, rose to a vaulted ceiling 25 or 30 feet above the floor.