Partway through Rabbit Is Rich, Harry and Janice buy a small two-story stone house with two bedrooms, presumably a servants’ house left over from the time when the entire neighborhood belonged to a single grand country estate.
I’ve never been to Pennsylvania, at least not except for Pittsburgh Airport, so I can’t wrap my mind around rhw idea of a small stone house. Where I come from, small houses are built of framing, drywall, and stucco; or if they’re really old they might be all wood.
I don’t understand. Small stone houses are not only common across the world, they are in loads of movies and TV series and documentaries, and all it would take is a google search. How can you not imagine what one looked like?
Eh. I suspect that’s a standard wood 2x4 framing house with very thin decorative limestone strips glued to the exterior boarding. The late 50s early 60s were big on all sorts of stone cladding applied to the front face of a standard stick-built house. And usually only the front face.
Wasn’t intended to be. I haven’t read the book in question - is there any indication in the story that he’s buying something out in the country, or in a suburb? Around here (Indiana, where limestone is plentiful), that house would be described as having stone exterior, even if the interior structure is standard wood studs.
Here’s a stone house in Cleveland Heights. it is the oldest structure in the city and one of the oldest in the Cleveland area. Built in 1825 out of locally quarried Berea Sandstone.
Growing up in Milwaukee, I saw entire neighborhoods of “Lannon stone houses”, built with a type of dolomite from quarries in Lannon, WI. Take a drive along the Menominee River in Wauwatosa and you’ll see dozens, often five or six in a row.
Here’s a pintrest page:
Oh, here’s one more like what I grew up near. Notice many smaller stone houses in the same block.
I think digs’ example probably comes closest to how I imagine the house in the novel (I know, what I imagine has little value compared to actual facts, but it’s good enough for reading a novel).
I’m genuinely curious, did you do a Google Image search before asking on the boards? If not, was the reason it didn’t occur to you or you wanted some kind of information from the boards that was qualitatively different from a Google Image search?
This genuinely isn’t an attack, I’m open to all of these different possibilities but this seems like a strange post from my perspective.
How the would I know how to frame my query? Even the novel itself described the house as a rare architectural survival, and that was published 45 years ago. It isn’t hard to write a query whose results include what I was looking for, but it’s more difficult to make it exclude irrelevant results.
Fair enough at one level - a search on “Pennsylvania stone house” will find Fallingwater as well as the pic I posted. But you don’t have a three word limit on Google search these days either.
