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Overview
With inspirational photographs paired with practical information, this is the perfect book on decorating the exterior and interior of a country cottage.Offering a delightful escape to the simple country life, The Perfect Country Cottage includes lively photographs of small country houses from Cornwall to Maine, from Scandinavia to Greece, making it an essential companion for everyone wanting to decorate and style a country retreat.
Chapters focus not only on interiors spaces—kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms—but also on exterior spaces such as flower and vegetable gardens, patios, and decks. Exterior details are fully explored, and close attention is given to topics special to decorating a country cottage, such as soft furnishings, floors, painted furniture, architectural details, garden furniture and storage. In addition, the author, who specializes in country buildings, traces the evolution of the country cottage from simple farmworkers' dwellings to modern rural oases from hectic urban life.
Other Details: 175 full-color illustrations 144 pages 9 1/2 x 9 1/2" Published 1994
machine, the 17th-century French queen Marie Antoinette eschewed the glitz of Versailles Palace life for the pseudo-country style of Le Hameau. Across the channel in England, William Morris' contempt for conspicuous consumption and opulent artificiality brought about the Arts and Crafts movement, and a renewed appreciation of hand-crafted furniture and fittings.
At the end of the twentieth century, individual craftspeople are once more in demand, among them woodturners, carpenters and stonemasons. At the same time, many exterior vernacular features such as half-timbering, dormer windows, half-hipped roofs, country kitchens and ledge-and-brace doors have become standard elements in the design of countless housing estates. The cottage tradition lives on.
Cottages and the Landscape
Why does a Cumbrian cottage with its black stone and green slate roof differ so dramatically from a simple Mediterranean house with walls of whitewashed rubble and a roof of Roman tiles? The answer is the vernacular building tradition. Vernacular is the Latin word for a slave born in his master's house and thus a native. Vernacular buildings are those that are native to their own province.
Such folk buildings were among the earliest forms of architecture and it is the tried and tested methods of vernacular building design that have endured long enough to inform the design process of many a modern skyscraper. But a legacy of traditional buildings survives around the world: red, Roman-tiled farmhouses in southern France; reed and timber marshland huts in Italy's Caserta region and settlers' timber cottages on the east coast of America.
These buildings mirror the underlying groundstones, slipping inconspicuously into the surrounding countryside and colouring our judgement about what looks right and proper in the countryside. As William Wordsworth put it, they 'may rather be said to have grown than to have been erected—to have risen by an instinct of their own, out of the native rock—so little is there in them of formality, such is their wildness and beauty.'
Wordsworth was referring to his native Cumbrian cot, sheltering in the lea of some craggy fell, its rough stone walls bright with whitewash, and its two tubby chimneys poking out from a roof of Westmoreland slate. He might have said the same thing about a Finnish log cabin, sheathed in weathered, vertical boards, its open-air gallery looking out across a vast area of birchwood scrub. The two scenes are as purposeful as they are picturesque, for each building evolved to make the best use of local climate and topography.
Restoring Original Features
Tracing the history of your home can be an absorbing task. Try to establish the original layout of the cottage. Built-up doorways or the remains of an old arch in a wall are useful clues, while a stone lower floor with a half-timbered upper floor suggests that the second storey was a later addition to the building.
Most small country houses functioned as both home and workplace. The original layout will often reveal its former use: an open-plan upper floor lit by unusually large windows could indicate a cottage weaving gallery; a slab-floored cellar with a drain down the centre may be the remains of a wine or beer store from a former inn.
Look at the exterior materials; handmade bricks are irregular in both shape and colour, while Roman bricks, still in use today, are twice the length and half the thickness of a conventional brick. Check whether the outside facing material of brick, boarding or render conceals older material.
Although most roofs will have been stripped and replaced every century, they are a useful key to the past. Explore the roof space where former timbers will be retained; smoke blackened timbers indicate an old hall house, once open up to the roof.
Documentary evidence on small, rural homes is often rudimentary but parish records, early maps and estate journals are good starting places. If your home was once a working building like a mill, farmhouse, cafe or smithy, there is a better chance of it having been recorded somewhere.
Datestones and commemorative inscriptions are helpful although they were often inscribed to celebrate a rebuilding rather than the founding of the cottage. Tracing back the original cottage name can also provide pertinent clues as to its origins.
Synopsis
With inspirational photographs paired with practical information, this is the perfect book on decorating the exterior and interior of a country cottage.
Offering a delightful escape to the simple country life, The Perfect Country Cottage includes lively photographs of small country houses from Cornwall to Maine, from Scandinavia to Greece, making it an essential companion for everyone wanting to decorate and style a country retreat.
Chapters focus not only on interiors spaces—kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms—but also on exterior spaces such as flower and vegetable gardens, patios, and decks. Exterior details are fully explored, and close attention is given to topics special to decorating a country cottage, such as soft furnishings, floors, painted furniture, architectural details, garden furniture and storage. In addition, the author, who specializes in country buildings, traces the evolution of the country cottage from simple farmworkers' dwellings to modern rural oases from hectic urban life.
Other Details: 175 full-color illustrations 144 pages 9 1/2 x 9 1/2" Published 1994
machine, the 17th-century French queen Marie Antoinette eschewed the glitz of Versailles Palace life for the pseudo-country style of Le Hameau. Across the channel in England, William Morris' contempt for conspicuous consumption and opulent artificiality brought about the Arts and Crafts movement, and a renewed appreciation of hand-crafted furniture and fittings.
At the end of the twentieth century, individual craftspeople are once more in demand, among them woodturners, carpenters and stonemasons. At the same time, many exterior vernacular features such as half-timbering, dormer windows, half-hipped roofs, country kitchens and ledge-and-brace doors have become standard elements in the design of countless housing estates. The cottage tradition lives on.
Cottages and the Landscape
Why does a Cumbrian cottage with its black stone and green slate roof differ so dramatically from a simple Mediterranean house with walls of whitewashed rubble and a roof of Roman tiles? The answer is the vernacular building tradition. Vernacular is the Latin word for a slave born in his master's house and thus a native. Vernacular buildings are those that are native to their own province.
Such folk buildings were among the earliest forms of architecture and it is the tried and tested methods of vernacular building design that have endured long enough to inform the design process of many a modern skyscraper. But a legacy of traditional buildings survives around the world: red, Roman-tiled farmhouses in southern France; reed and timber marshland huts in Italy's Caserta region and settlers' timber cottages on the east coast of America.
These buildings mirror the underlying groundstones, slipping inconspicuously into the surrounding countryside and colouring our judgement about what looks right and proper in the countryside. As William Wordsworth put it, they 'may rather be said to have grown than to have been erected—to have risen by an instinct of their own, out of the native rock—so little is there in them of formality, such is their wildness and beauty.'
Wordsworth was referring to his native Cumbrian cot, sheltering in the lea of some craggy fell, its rough stone walls bright with whitewash, and its two tubby chimneys poking out from a roof of Westmoreland slate. He might have said the same thing about a Finnish log cabin, sheathed in weathered, vertical boards, its open-air gallery looking out across a vast area of birchwood scrub. The two scenes are as purposeful as they are picturesque, for each building evolved to make the best use of local climate and topography.
Restoring Original Features
Tracing the history of your home can be an absorbing task. Try to establish the original layout of the cottage. Built-up doorways or the remains of an old arch in a wall are useful clues, while a stone lower floor with a half-timbered upper floor suggests that the second storey was a later addition to the building.
Most small country houses functioned as both home and workplace. The original layout will often reveal its former use: an open-plan upper floor lit by unusually large windows could indicate a cottage weaving gallery; a slab-floored cellar with a drain down the centre may be the remains of a wine or beer store from a former inn.
Look at the exterior materials; handmade bricks are irregular in both shape and colour, while Roman bricks, still in use today, are twice the length and half the thickness of a conventional brick. Check whether the outside facing material of brick, boarding or render conceals older material.
Although most roofs will have been stripped and replaced every century, they are a useful key to the past. Explore the roof space where former timbers will be retained; smoke blackened timbers indicate an old hall house, once open up to the roof.
Documentary evidence on small, rural homes is often rudimentary but parish records, early maps and estate journals are good starting places. If your home was once a working building like a mill, farmhouse, cafe or smithy, there is a better chance of it having been recorded somewhere.
Datestones and commemorative inscriptions are helpful although they were often inscribed to celebrate a rebuilding rather than the founding of the cottage. Tracing back the original cottage name can also provide pertinent clues as to its origins.