When the Fahrenheit drops and yet another blanket of snow is falling, one’s mind wanders to sunnier possibilities. I find this wandering to especially pronounced when one’s bank account is low—poverty, at least in my case, seems to inspire grand ideas that have little chance of being fulfilled. At least that seemed to be the case until I began studying more thoroughly Margaret Olthof Goldsmith’s Designs for Outdoor Living (George W. Stewart, 1941). Suddenly our signal lack of funds seems to be not such a bad thing, given the low-cost opportunities.
The book arrived in my post-office box several weeks ago, at just the moment when I needed more photographs and information about artist Bernard Boutet de Monvel’s folly of a house in Palm Beach, Florida. The majority of images in Goldsmith's book focus on areas of houses not often considered at great length in shelter publications, even today, such as patios, loggias, pool houses, terraces, children's play areas, adult recreation areas, and such. Several of her entries have caught my eye, especially since for several years my spouse and I have been discussing what to do with the large patch of lawn at the end of the raised beds at the back of our house. It would be nice to have a pool there someday, something long, lean, and trough-like, natural looking rather than Caribbean. Until then, however, we’d like to erect at the rear of that green swatch, a cabana of sorts, a simple outbuilding that would welcome lazy afternoons and warm-weather dinners and which would come in handy whenever that pool ever does come into our lives.
Here are some of the outbuildings that are inspiring me:

Harold W. Grieve's spectator's gallery for the home of Arlene Judge, a Hollywood actress better known for her seven short-lived marriages than for her screen career.

For the home of actress Helen Hayes and her husband, Charles MacArthur, in Nyack, New York, architect Mary Deputy Lamson designed a board-and-batten Gothic Revival-style bathhouse inspired by a 19th-century school.

Architect Aymar Embury 2d designed two bathhouses with a connecting pergola for the Purchase, New York, farm of New York Port Authority chairman Howard S. Cullman and his writer wife, Marguerite. This project is our favorite, and we think could be recreated for a reasonable cost.