Sun-traps for Young Players

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 556, 17 February 1950, Page 18

Sun-traps for Young Players

Written tor "The Listener"

by

AUGUSTUS

: **°A H, a real sun-trap!" murmured a friend of mine approvingly when he saw the plan of a house which attracted a good deal of attention recently. This is the reaction we have been conditioned to have by extensive propaganda over the last few years, culminating I notice in official exhortations from the Health Department to "build for the sun," Since the war a tremendous number of young couples have availed themselves of the Rehab. Loan to which they have added every penny of their own that they could lay hands on in order to build a house. Every one of them has been sun-trapped. The modern house takes a series of zig-zags across the , ath of the sun, and on every zig and every zag an expanse of glass sucks at the blazing stream of vitamin D and pours it inte the house. The kitchen windows and walls swallow gallons of the State-sponsored drug while the flies hang in narcotic stupor from the ceiling and light-cords, and incubate and multiply a million-fold on the bench and on the food. The housewife droops over the stove and the butter oozes through its wrapping. Visitors gasp in the lounge. The man of the house clutches at the chance of overtime work so that he can save enough to buy blinds whose dreary aspect is offensively relieved by ornate scallops and fancy fringes. Once the trap has been set and the victims inveigled into it, they must set about endless defensive measures to combat the attack to which they have been exposed. Roller blinds are found to intensify the ordeal, for they allow the heat to enter but restrict the flow of air through the windows. They also flap irritatingly and distress the heated nerves. All my friends now speak of venetian blinds,. which are going to cost them a small fortune, but which they hope to be able to afford after they have. paid off their furnitute loan. They do not seem to be dismayed. at the thought of all the vitamin D which the blinds will

‘exclude, nor do they consider it important any more that they should be able to look out of the windows. The advantage of an "outlook" will be as thankfully forgone as travel warrants at the end of a war. OR it is a war in the modern house. Man is called upon to protect his home against the devices of r&San. Nobody can sit idle while the green coverings in one room become off- "green day by day, and the blue furnishings in another grow steadily off-blue. The anxious inmates look to a time ahead when the whole house will be furnished in a universal off-white. It is no inducement to sleep after a perspiring day to hear in the cooling night one’s hundred pound _ furniture

loan ,creaking and writhing in an effort to resume the right angles with which it came from the shop. How often have I heard the horrified gasp of a houseowner who has just got himself and his family five miles from home under some shady willows and suddenly remembers that he didn’t draw the blinds in the bedroom. His day is ruined as he malevolently watches the sun in its relentless advance, thinking, "Now it will be catching the end of the tallboy ..." and he seems to hear the crack and groan of the timbers and to see, the brilliant polish of the bed-ends hattening and splintering. When the afternoon tea billy is boiling his thoughts are far away on the blue satin bedspreads. Our elders managed these things better. Having found themselves in a Mediterranean climate, the antipodes of Spain, not Scotland, they ran’ out verandahs round the hot side and kept the sun in its place. Inside those houses you feel inside, and are grateful for it. But with the present cost of building verandahs are unhappily out. HE campaign behind the ‘sun-trap is careful to use all sorts of guile to conceal the snares and parade the advantages. The would-be house-owner is entranced by a photograph of a sitting room which seems all space and beauty and light. He should be warned that the wily photographer achieves this effect by removing‘the furniture. A gleaming floor runs in violent perspective away to a radiant oblong of glass which seems all

of thirty feet distant. The chaste walls diminish to a stone fireplace it will cost him sixty pounds to install. The clean lines are only broken by a long bookshelf two feet high which also houses a built-in radio-both books and tuning knobs being at a height of enormous attraction to two-year-old destroyers, but almost. inaccessible to the full-grown householder. Let the owner-to-be ravish thi¢ prospect with enough chairs to accommodate himself and his family and friends. Let him people the hearth with scuttles and shovels, the walls with pictures he has

-- had as ‘wedding presents, the mantelpiece with cigarette packets and ashtrays and vases, and the windows with curtains and blinds, and he will find himself banished from that aseptic splendour to the cluttered, homely, bourgeois and stifling sitting room that all one’s friends are stuck with. GAIN the Modern Home will show you "built-in units" (like that radio we mentioned). "In these days of restricted building space," runs the legend, "built-in furniture is the only answer." Let us examine this .proposition. Suppose that to accommodate three people a seating area of ten square feet is needed. The mddern houseplanner anchors this ten-square-feet to the wall in the shape of a built-in divan. It still occupies ten square feet, but you can’t shift it. If the sun is blazing into the trap there is no escape for the divansquatters. In the winter there is no "drawing up" to the fire. You cannot use the divan as an emergency sleeper because the bedclothes won’t tuck in behind. "But," says the clean-limbed limner, "you have cupbeard space below the divan, and besides, the dust can’t get under." The answer to this is (1) No selfrespecting matron chooses to wriggle under the bed for her preserves or her blankets. (2) You can still, it you are keen on that sort of thing, build these lilliputian cupboards under a movable divan, and they even provide further

be oa seating space Ya divan ay Pell obt? 3% Q)NE of my feietide was prevailed upon to build a dining unit into the alcove he had allowed for eating in. There is room for six persons, providing four of them have absorbed enough vitaman D to be able to scramble into their places. There are two elegant forms screwed into place .

alongside a central screwed-down table. The first two devotees of space-saving assume a sitting posture as they approach the dining unit. Maintaining this attitude they shuffle along sideways until they reach the far end. Then. diners three and four who have anxiously watched this performance now step forward in their turn and in'sitting pos-, ture, and move into place. The last two athletes easily fit into the remaining gaps and give a clinch to the whole arrangement, which remains intact in this way unless diners one, two, three or four are called to the phone. The physical benefits derived from setting such a table as this are said to be only equaWed by the mutriment absorbed through the blinds in the lounge. If, instead of such,a rigid arrangement (which, while it does not fill the alcove, makes it useless for any other purpose), an old-fashioned device known as an

} extending table, to- | gether with six light and miovable units known as dining chairs had been used, these could have been pushed ' back to the wall ‘when not in use, they could have served for other purposes than eating, , and besides, my friends might have , invited their grand mother to lunch. | When I build a house, I'm going to let abundance of

brick wall insulate me against heat and cold. I’m going to have windows mainly on the east and west, and the kitchen on the south. I’m going to have a sunporch vith gliss to the floor which will give me my vitamins when I feel like them (though they say the stuff doesn’t get through glass anyway). I’m going tc have nothing glued’ to the floor except the wardrobes and cupboards. There will be fireside chairs that the children can move about with one hand, The furnishings will not be rugged and sunproof, but as delicately made and tinted as I can have them, and the woodwork will be highly polished to show its graining. In the winter I shall sit in the sunpotch, or better stifl, pull up a chair to the fire. In the summer the windows on the west will have no flapping blinds to keep the air from flowing, and I'll be letting the sun trap itself against a brick wall. --