Inspiring Cabins & Cottages

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• A modest-sized (under 2,000 square feet), compact footprint that does not necessarily sacrifice a sense of spaciousness in the floor plan.

• A human-scale entryway that welcomes you home.

• An unpretentious and intimate interior, most often centered around a hearth, in which you instantly feel warm, relaxed and cozy.

• An exterior that makes good use of indigenous materials. Shingle siding, cedar-shake roofs and fieldstone say cottage; vinyl siding paints a different picture.

• Well-crafted, sometimes quirky architectural details.

• The use of sashed windows some diminutive in size to reinforce the human scale of the building from the outside while giving a sense of security and protection to those inside.

• Thoughtful orientation of the building to the site and sun, relatively informal landscaping, and the presence of exterior rooms (porches, patios, decks) all of which allow the house to respond to, and easily engage, its natural surroundings.

There are other attributes that come to mind cozy nooks, high-pitched roofs, low ceilings, bare wood floors, built-in furnishings, to name a few but the seven characteristics listed above are, to me, the defining features of the small cottage home.

Going small is not done just for the sake of quaintness. Reducing volume also makes a structure energy- and resource-efficient, saving money that can go toward richer materials and the crafting of intimate, artful details inside and out. Architect Robert Gerloff of Minneapolis reminds his clients it is the details that hold our interest, that can make the cottage as unforgettable as a villa.

And it is the details that also give a home a sense of charm, intimacy and rightness ... and the ineffable sense of having been lovingly created by its builders.

Excerpted from The New Cottage Home (Taunton Press).

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