Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 February 1875 — German Houses. [ARTICLE]

German Houses.

Nobody can draw you a plan of a dwelling more nicely to a scale than a German, and yet German houses lack some of the most obvious requisites to domestic comfort. How, for example, the good housewives have got on during these past centuries without a closet (a “ clothes-press.” as we call it sometimes) is a most inexplicable mystery. Go into almost any German dwelling of the middle classes, and you would think that the family had just moved in, or were just moving out, such is the quantity of wardrobes and bureaus in the front hall. But when you come to inquire you find that things have been thus for a score of years, the lack of closets crowding such furniture into every vacant place. It seems,likewise, a rather singular arrangement of a residence to put the kitchen next to the front door, so that all your visitors have to pass it on the way to the parlor. But such is almost universally the case with German houses. Truth to tell, the architect is yet to be horn in this country who will teach the people how to build with a view to living after a comfortable fashion. Then comes the matter of ventilation. Probably no people understand the theory of this better than the Germans, but they all act as if they had made a special arrangement with divine Providence whereby they could thrive on carbonic acid gas. In all places of public assembly fresh air is the abhorrence of the Germans. If a suffering Yankee lets* window down or opens a door he will be assailed with such a quantity of coughs and sneezes as will bring him to repentance if he is not morally obtuse. — Lev. J. L. Corning, in Christian Union. ./