Introduction

• This chronology of the cottage home is to show the historical roots of cottage features.
• Each style is highlighted for its contributions but not fully developed in and of itself.

• Medieval Britain and European serfs and servants lived in “kots.”
• The kot was a 1-2 room dwelling centered around a rough stone hearth.
• They were built of indigenous timber or stone on an exposed masonry foundation.
• Wattle and daub was a construction technique which is now expressed as a textured wall.
• The home had a bowed or high pitched thatched roof and a low door entry to retain heat.

• By the mid 1600’s the cottage was the common rural dwelling of farmers and merchants.
• New building techniques allowed larger footprints, higher roofs and second floor sleeping.
• By the late 1800’s diamond paned windows and hoods emerged from the aristocratic past.

• The first colonists built wattle and daub cottages with clapboard to protect from the rains.
• By the late 1700’s the simple single-gabled Cape Cod became a unique cottage form.
• It had either clapboard or shingle siding, flowers and shrubbery, and a white picket fence.

• In the 1840’s to 1860’s the cottage was “romanticized” by the Romantic Movement.
• Designers strove to balance utility (simplicity and comfort) with beauty.
• While ornate in detail, usefulness was never sacrificed to the ornamental.
• They had eave brackets, verandas, fancy segmented chimneys and decorative bargeboard.
• Gothic revival cottages had porches and entries, insulation and bay windows.
• These homes featured regularity in proportion and symmetry with occasional asymmetry.

• East coast religious camp cottages introduced the cottage as a retreat and in clusters.
• “Shotgun” houses of New Orleans had delicate ornamentation on the street side only.
• Hugh Comstock cottages built in the early 1900’s in Carmel were Gothic seaside retreats.
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s large-scaled homes opened up segmented rooms for a spacious feel.
• Arts and crafts bungalows had large overhangs and porch columns and sloped foundation.
• Bernard Maybeck emphasized structure (beams) as ornament over decorative overlays.