rom its seventeenth-century beginnings the crafting of the New En­gland house achieved a timeless excellence, a felicitous composition of simple details in the snug, domestic scale that still charms us. Through the years, as pioneering was succeeded by a measure of security and affluence, the house evolved handsome and more ornate variations, until its mid-nineteenth-century confrontation with a fast developing industrial land that had lost touch with beauty. Later, after century's turn, a few architects along the eastern seaboard began to resurrect the prototype, or reasonable facsimile thereof, but almost none was discerning enough to avoid clumsiness in design, or quite able to shed the influence of architectural aberrations he had, inevitably, been bred to. The average small house was still conceived and executed in high-posted ugliness, replete with a few wood turnings and a little jig-sawn scroll­work to give it class. Yet the physical re-creation and the enduring virtues of our early houses were to be restored to us and, by common agreement among many fellow professionals, the man who achieved the miraculous was Royal Barry Wills.

Of course it behooves a New Englander never to forget that the world is full of areas with valid images, and who's to proclaim the most worthy among them, and in reference to what sort of values? Yet where could one ever behold a more simpatico melding of intimate landscape and simple, attractive houses than hereabouts—at least where industry hasn't cast its blight? The ancestral plowshares may have turned up a few stones and the climate may have had its harsh moments, but what an Eden of small green valleys, ponds and little streams, in which to build their trim, white domiciles, fronted in time by towering elms or maples! Here was a social continuity where families bred and succeeded one another, adding wings, or barns as the need arose. Our assess­ment and use of this heritage is based on an appreciation of its physical charms and their adaptability to our present needs but, too, there is an inevitable residuum of affection for the homes that sheltered our sturdy ancestors in the days before trailer living, fly-now-and-pay-later and the credit card.

For years the average small house had been of uncertain lineage, the product of vestigial talent out of a Victorian inheritance and, furthermore, of little pecuniary interest to the emerging profession of architecture. It could hardly have been otherwise at the time, because our major offices served the new wealth and smaller, less grandiose practitioners took the less profitable leavings. They had to make a living and eschewed house design because one could never turn a fair profit for his efforts. That was the accepted gospel except, perhaps, with the young Royal Barry Wills.