And what is his own house like? If he be a young and fairly successful Kansas City business man, it is, first of all, probably a solid, well-built house. Very likely it is built of brick and is "detached"--just barely detached--and faces a parked boulevard or a homelike residence street which is lined with other solid little houses, like his own. Now, while the homes of this class are, I think, better built and more attractive than homes of corresponding cost in some older cities--Cleveland, for example--and while the streets are pleasanter, there is a sort of standardized look about these houses which is, I think, unfortunate. The thing they lack is individuality. Whole rows of them suggest that they were all designed by the same altogether honest, but somewhat inartistic, architect, who, having hit on one or two good plans, kept repeating them, ad infinitum, with only minor changes, such as the use of vari-colored brick, for "character." True, they are monuments to the esthetic, compared with the old brownstone blocks of New York City, or the Queen Anne blocks of cities such as Cleveland, but it must be remembered that New York's brownstone period, and the wooden Queen Anne period, date back a good many years, whereas these Kansas City houses are new. And it is in our new houses that we Americans have had a chance to show (and are showing) the improvement in our national taste. I do not complain that the domestic architecture of Kansas City represents no improvement; I complain only that the improvement shown is not so great as it should be--that Kansas City residences, of all classes, inexpensive and expensive, in town and in the suburban developments, are generally characterized by solidity, rather than architectural merit. The less expensive houses lack distinction in about the same way that rows of good ready-made overcoats may be said to lack it, when compared with overcoats made to order by expensive tailors. The more costly houses are for the most part ordinary--and some of them are worse than that.
I am well aware of the fact that the foregoing statements are altogether likely to surprise and annoy Kansas City, for if there is one thing, beyond her parks and boulevards, upon which she congratulates herself peculiarly, it is her homes. I could detect that, both in the pride with which the homes were shown to me and in the sad silences with which my very mildly critical comments on some houses, were received. Nevertheless, it is quite true that Kansas City very evidently needs a good domestic architect or two; and if she does not pardon me just now for saying so, I must console myself with the thought that, ten or fifteen years hence, she will admit that what I said was true.