This month, thousands of American families are settling down in

Summer Houses

which they have rented, bought, built or improved. Many more thousands are dreaming about buying or building.

How many summer houses were built in the US last year is anybody's guess (p. 157), but the number is in the tens of thousands and likely to increase. Reason: new sites have been opened up within week-end radius of most big citie-” opened up by big new highways, by cheaper air-travel, by more leisure time.

Guerrero

Armonk, N. Y. house.    The most important fact about

David Henken, Designer.    summer houses is that they are

or should be very different from year-round houses.

They are different in their heating and cooling needs, in their ventilating needs, in their storage needs, in their planning needs, in their over-all design needs. They have different construction and financing problems.

A second reason for presenting summer houses now is that they

tend to show a much more experimental design approach.

People have fewer preconceived ideas about the way a summer house should look and so they are willing to accept shapes, forms, structures, colors that they might resist in their year-round homes. That plus the fact that summer houses don't have the usual winter problem-”makes the summer house a small and lively design laboratory for home building.