The Perfect Country Cottage - Hardcover

Laws, Bill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1558597840 ISBN 13: 9781558597846

Publisher: Abbeville Press, 1994

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Bill Laws is the author of Traditional Houses of Rural France and Old English Farmhouses. He lives in Hereforshire, England, with his wife and three children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

PERFECT COTTAGES

The concept of the perfect country cottage is one of infinite variety and style. The cottage a small house which fits harmoniously into its rural setting and whose unselfconscious interior is cosy and welcoming may be a limestone worker’s dwelling in the Cotswolds, a timber-framed house in New England or a tiny stone and thatch shelter in Ireland. Traditionally, these homes were built by local builders using indigenous materials to blend effortlessly into the surrounding natural landscape.

To our modern eyes, the most evocative and atmospheric country homes are those which have retained their original character while having been sympathetically restored using salvaged or carefully reproduced elements such as fireplaces, beams, exposed brick walls, doors, windows and shutters.

From the time when people first settled the land to the contemporary urban longing for an uncomplicated country existence, the unpretentious rural dwelling has retained firm favor in the popular imagination. Different people have different ideas about what constitutes the perfect country cottage. For a modern family of Boston back-to-the-landers perfection could mean an ecologically sound timber-framed cabin standing on fertile soil and close, but not too close, to the village school and grocery store. Their counterparts in a Stockholm suburb might prefer a user-friendly small house with a distinctly country feel and all the amenities of modern life. In Milan, meanwhile, the idyllic retreat for city-weary people might be a winter chalet high up on an isolated mountain pass.

The common thread running through these lives is the desire to live in simple, country-style surroundings, in harmony with the rural environment. This universal desire knows no geographical boundaries and has given us a rich variety of vernacular building styles.

Take the reed-thatched and whitewashed Camargue cabane and the snow white clapboard of a small Massachusetts farmhouse. Both employ the three basic materials common to all cottage building timber, earth and stone yet the two buildings are as far apart in looks as they are in distance. Designs vary from country to country, region to region, even from village to village. Among the apple orchards and cattle pastures of French Normandy one village is dominated by low, long houses with a crest of lilies on their thatched ridges; in the next village sturdy limestone houses with dark slate roofs predominate because of the local abundance of these materials. Before cheap, mass produced materials became widely available, each parish built its homes from whatever lay close to hand. Function rather than fashion ruled the vernacular look.

But the see-saw world of style and design has regularly paid homage to the small country dwelling. Before losing her head on Doctor Guillotin’s machine, the 17-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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Abbeville Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1558597840
• ISBN 13: 9781558597846
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144