What is a “cottage” anyway?
I don’t know about you but when I hear the word “cottage” I think of thatched roofs, yeoman farmers, and maybe Frodo Baggins. It’s all a bit “twee” as my oldest son might say. But somehow when we started to consider what kind of house to build the word cottage kept coming up.
Lucky for us we had seen some examples of this kind of building done right. The summer before Nora and I had spent a few days at Palmetto Bluff in the South Carolina low country (that’s what they call a swamp down there) while on our way to Charleston. Just south of Big Chill country and along the May River, it’s a quaint place, if you happen to be quaintly wealthy, but fun to visit. A tidy little community, it’s made up almost entirely of cottages, some big, some small, and a cluster of cozier duplexes tucked along the riverbank and rented out by the Inn there.
The place can be a little theme-park like in the aggregate – you expect someone in a Donald Duck costume to come barreling around the corner at any minute – but it provides an ideal laboratory for studying cottages. What we found was that the traditional cottage design was open to modernizing, flexible enough to allow for a combination of homey feel with open space, lots of windows, and clean lines – Bag End meets Frank Lloyd Wright. Very similar to what we had in mind.
We biked around, taking pictures, making plans. We ate lunch at the cafe, walked out on the dock to view the sail boats as they breezed along the channel. We watched an armadillo nuzzle his way through the pine straw just outside our door in search of insects. And we thought of what we might build if we ever happened to find the right piece of land.
Note: photo from Palmetto Bluff
500 miles 