LIVING ON THE LEVEL: ONE-STORY HOUSES
Royal Barry Wills
Royal Barry Wills: LIVING ON THE LEVEL: ONE-STORY HOUSES. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Press, 1954. First edition. A very good hard cover book in a good dust jacket with shelf wear including a long tear along the front French-fold's seam and worn fore edges with several chips [one large] missing. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print.
9 x 12.25 hard cover book with 120 profusely-illustrated pages: "The book is crammed with plans and sketches [more than half of them in two colors]."
From "Planning Your Home Wisely" [Franklin Watts, Inc., New York, 1946]: "Our American eclecticism really deserves most of the bad things Modernists hurl at it, but not all of them. Long before the advent of a revolutionary Modernism as a world force in building design, we had regional architecture in this country which grew from the plainest beginnings, but sensitively, to meet the needs and use the materials that were locally dominant."
- PART ONE
- Past Imperfect and Future Conditional
- Notes on Putting the Right Foot Forward
- Getting a Lot for Your Money
- Before the House the Architect
- The Advantages of Living on the Level
- How to Analyze Your Needs
- He Who Does the Building
- Sticks and Stones
- Sound Advice and the Multipurpose Room
- Come Into the Kitchen
- Dining as of Today
- The Matter of Sleeping
- The Order of the Bath
- Storage
- Check List for Easy Living
- Try This for Size in Dollars and Sense
- Money Savers and Ideas
- PART TWO
- Kitchens
- How to Build a House for $5,000
- Sketches of Houses
From the web site for Royal Barry Wills Associates: "Houses designed or influenced by Royal Barry Wills were ubiquitous, as Americans devoured his books, discovered his designs in homemaker and housebuilding magazines and newspapers, and either bought his plans or contacted him for a custom design. By the time of his death, in 1962, Wills and his firm were responsible for more than 2,500 houses. Wills was so popular that a writer for the Saturday Evening Post in 1958 observed: 'Many a would-be home owner, surveying the infinite variations of Mr. Wills's Cape Codders in plan books and magazines has concluded that he is the man who somehow-invented-the-design.'"