New Kentucky Home

Centrepiece of a National Home Show which opened in Louisville last week was a low, rambling white house built inside Jefferson County Armory in five working days, complete with garden, fireplace, tangerine linoleum, taffeta bedspreads and soap in the soap dishes.

A first-night crowd of 12,000 thronged happily through this new Kentucky home. At show's end it will be torn down, erected permanently in a Louisville suburb for sale at $8,250. Designed by Treanor & Fatio, swank Manhattan architectural firm, whose house commissions normally run from $25,000 up, it was the first LIFE house of 1940 to be completed.

Abuilding last week all over the U. S. were 98 other LIFE houses. They are planned to show how readily any family earning from $2,000 to $5,000 a year may get an efficient, pleasant house. They will cost from $2,850 to $6,900 (with land, up to $10,000). Eight top-architectural firms designed the eight houses at nominal fees: Cameron Clark; Gardner A. Dailey; Holabird & Root; Howe & Brown; Perry, Shaw & Hepburn; Shaw, Naess & Murphy; Shreve, Lamb & Harmon; Treanor & Fatio.

In itself, no one of LIFE'S houses is a final architectural answer.* But together they tot up to a highest common denominator of good U. S. design. Laymen who looked at them could see the shape of housing things to come: a decline of the dining room, an increasing use of plywood--the club sandwich of wood and glue that can lick its weight in steel.

Every homeowner knows that where to put the garage is a perennial problem. For convenience, it should be near the front of the lot, but never looks right there. If put in back, its driveway wastes much of a small lot's area. Most ingenious solution among the LIFE houses: Howe & Brown's garage attached to a covered porch which half conceals it, serves also as a sheltered passageway to the front door.

* Development of two "perfect houses," after three years' study, was announced last week by Chairman Gardner Wade Taylor of the Northeastern Home Foundation. Standard five-room jobs, of one and two stories respectively, they will sell for about $4,000 and $5,000.

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