Cottage House Plans
Our cottage plans are quite diverse, offering you lots of options. A search of our cottage house plans and small cottage plans will reveal a wide range of homes from all over the U.S. Because cottages are often small, and often built in the country, you may wish to search our small house plans and country house plans as well. There is no precise definition of a cottage. The dictionary defines them as “a small, usually frame (construction) one-family house”, or as “a small house for vacation use”. But a large house can still look like a cottage, so we include cottage floor plans for these larger homes as well.
Homes built from cottage home plans are often referred to as “cozy”. Our cottage building plans are designed to maintain this feel without feeling small or cramped. Open floor plans and an abundance of windows make the home feel larger without sacrificing that comforting feeling of a cozy home.
This feeling is often enhanced by the use of stone, brick and wood in both exterior construction and interior detail.
Common Characteristics of Cottage Plans:
- Irregular layout, often with a relatively small footprint
- Style of building as much as of architecture
- Simple, unpretentious interiors
- Often with exterior decorative detailing
- Usually steep pitch roof, often with gables
- Architecture tied directly to local landscape or region
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What follows are excerpts from “American Shelter”, written by Lester Walker, and published by Overlook Press in 1997
Cottage
The designs for cottages and farmhouses first portrayed by A. J. Downing in 1850 in The Architecture
of Country Houses had a profound effect on the country. They were the beginning of a real vernacular
domestic architecture that was to last a long time.
Downing’s houses were distinguished by steep roof slopes, balconies, porches, window gables, and deep shadows made by projecting roofs. He was after the ideal building- the house that suited the owner’s needs and the land best. He saw the picturesque as a natural style that could provide “true, honest, and functional” architecture yet fit the landscape in a romantic way.
The Cottage Style borrowed from the Early Gothic Style but also created new rules soon to be followed by American house builders. The house was to be irregular like the forms of nature. It was to be nestled into the landscape to appear picturesque when viewed from various sites and also afford attractive views from its windows and porches. It was to be built of natural materials or painted tan, gray, or green to harmonize with the earth and its plants. It was the opposite of the symmetrical, hard-edged, white Greek Revival Style house designed to stand out in the landscape.
Many of the architects who contributed plans to Downing’s books also produced pattern books of their own. Among them were A. J. Davis’s Rural Residences (1837), Gervase Wheeler’s Rural Homes (1851), and Calvert Vaux’s Villas and Cottages (1857). They all emphasized the use of natural materials for building. The most significant of these was the utilization of board and batten siding for the exterior cladding of the house. This type of construction was welcomed by Downing as an honest and true replacement for painted flush-board siding meant to simulate cut stone. Board and batten siding also created strong vertical shadow lines totally in keeping with the Gothic Style. New tools like the steam powered scroll saw and the development of the balloon frame made wooden construction inevitable. It was an obvious choice because of an endless supply of lumber, which was made less expensive and easier to work with than stone.
During the mid-nineteenth century, many house pattern books, inspired by Downing, provided the increasingly large middle class with detailed plans of highly affordable cottages. The building boom that occurred then was not only a product of the American economy but of the availability of a technologically sound, easy-to-build, inexpensive, comfortable dwelling.
The Cottage Style is credited with giving birth to the American front porch. It provided a roof over the main entrance and a semiprivate place to sit and enjoy the outdoors while protected from the hot sun and inclement weather. It was usually covered with honeysuckle or some other flowering vine, which pleasantly scented warm summer evenings.
Downing, Davis, and many other American architects were greatly influenced by the English Picturesque Style. A few of the most characteristic houses from that period are sketched below. Notice the use of natural materials- rough in texture- and the irregularity of the massing and the overhanging roofs to produce deep shadows.