Cottage Plans & Small Cottage House Plans From

Cottage House Plans, Cottage Home Plans & Cottage Floor Plans

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.

What follows are excerpts from “The New Cottage Home”, written by Jim Tolpin, and published by Taunton Press in 1998. Taunton Press

The Appeal of the Cottage

What seems to be a constant is the idea of the cottage as a calm retreat, the place to go to get away from it all – be it a beach cottage overlooking the ocean, a mountain hideaway, a pastoral retreat nestled in the woods or field, or even a thoughtfully built cottage in town. It’s a place for lounging, for curling up with a good book, for napping, or for doing absolutely nothing. It’s small enough to personalize and make your own: If you want to hang lobster pots from the ceiling or carve snail shells for drawer pulls, who’s going to stop you?

The cottage as weekend/vacation getaway is only one aspect of the contemporary cottage. There’s also the cottage as permanent residence – a perfect home for young marrieds, empty-nesters, retirees. The appeal here is a house that’s easy to live in and easy to maintain, a house that encourages informal living while offering unpretentious comfort, a house that’s small enough to allow you to spend more on fine details, quality materials, and craftsmanship, a house that’s expressive about who you are and how you like to live your life.

The Cottage House

Of course, no one house offers all these attributes, but all the houses share many of these listed here:

• A modest sized (under 2,000 sq. ft.), compact footprint that does not necessarily sacrifice a sense of spaciousness in the floor plan.
• A human-scale entry that welcomes you home.
• An unpretentious and intimate interior – most often centered around a hearth – in which you instantly feel warm, relaxed, and cozy.
• An exterior that makes good use of indigenous materials. Shingle siding, cedar-shake roofs, and fieldstone say “cottage”; vinyl siding paints quite a different picture.
• Well-crafted, sometimes quirky architectural details.
• The use of sashed windows – some diminutive in size – to reinforce the human scale of the building from the outside while giving a sense of security and protection to those on the inside.

Thoughtful orientation of the building to the site and sun, relatively informal landscaping, and the presence of exterior “rooms” (porches, patios, decks) – all of which allow the house to respond to, and easily engage, its natural surroundings.

Designing the Cottage Home

The cottage, even in its modest simplicity, can be a challenging house to design and build. Unlike the generic development rambler, a cottage is much more than a pile of man-made panel stock and preassembled components brought to a piece of ground and hammered together into a dwelling. Instead, those called to design and build a cottage must meet a larger purpose: to create not simply a house, but a place – a place that is in harmony with the earth upon which it sits, with the cultural heritage of the region, and with the people who will be blessed to inhabit it.

Inherent in creating this sense of place is remembering – or relearning – what gives a house the essence of “cottage”: What it is about its form, the layout of its interior spaces, its architectural detailing, and its relationship to the surroundings that elevates it beyond just another small house.

Siting

You can begin by making abundant use of indigenous materials in the siding, masonry work, and even roofing. For example, your choice of a cedar-shake roof and board-and-batten siding may be an appropriate gesture both to local resources and to the cultural heritage of the region. You can tie the house visually to a surrounding forest of tall trees by taking advantage of the strong visual signature of board-and-batten siding. You can choose a color scheme after careful observation of the site at different times of the day (and seasons, if possible) that melds the building intimately into the tones and hues of the surrounding landscape. And you can provide a sense of transition from a course, rock-strewn site to the flat, man-made planes of wall and window surfaces through the generous use of stone masonry in the foundation work and chimney.

Scale and Form

Part of the appeal of the cottage-style house is its human-sized scale. This subliminal effect of scale reduction may explain the magical appeal of the archetypal cottage’s diminutive details: their intimate entryways, tiny windows, and low ceilings. Used with discretion, a strategy of reducing the scale of certain portions of the building – such as minimizing the perceived size of a gabled wall by setting distinctive trim elements between a mix of siding materials – can add a good measure of appeal to the cottage-style house.

The entryway is generally the first architectural element people relate to when approaching a house. As such, it is one of the signature elements that define the house as a home. For visually, texturally, and psychologically, it is the entryway that welcomes people – and a cottage welcome must be warm and enticing.

Windows

Windows are as essential component in the creation of the cottage-style home. More than simply openings in the wall to allow light and view to come into the house, they can be arranged to enhance and make visual sense of the building’s form. Furthermore, the need to relate the window opening to the wall surface creates an opportunity for distinctive ornamental elements. For substantial, detailed trim is not merely an add-on in cottage architecture – the boldness means something, it satisfies both the building and how we perceive it.

Basically, vertical windows make structural sense, in the same way as does the vertical structure of trees and our own bodies. In Kunstler’s analysis, the windows of an appealing, human-centered home should be vertical or square, never horizontal because “vertical windows frame the human figure in an upright, neutral, and dignified way – reflecting back the human qualities that we project on a house to begin with.” There’s a practical benefit as well: Tall, vertical windows help capture the full richness of daylight (because it comes from more sources, from the sky to the ground) – not to mention allowing those inside to view a broader scene.

The Roof

Modern architecture is in love with flat roofs, but the simple pitched roof is still the most powerful symbol of shelter. (Ask any child to draw you a picture of a house, and you can be pretty sure you’ll get a drawing of a single-gabled cottage.) Not only is the prominent, often high-pitched roof of the typical cottage house inherently attractive but it also provides a link to the past and to our gut-level instinct that says a firm presence of roof, both visually and physically, is essential to our feeling of being well sheltered.

Beyond providing a sense of well-being and security to the inhabitants, the prominent overhangs of an embracing roof also help you create bold shadow lines that define and make sense of the structural elements and overall proportions of the house. Overhangs provide an opportunity to install ornamental moldings and brackets – evocative details that draw our eye and pull at our heart.

A substantial roof overhang also protects the building – the more overhang, the more it shields the wall siding and foundation from the elements. If the roof cants toward the prevailing winter winds, it can direct the cold-air flow up and over the house, reducing heating bills.

There are more advantages: A large overhang helps keep the house cool in the summer by providing shade. In rainstorms, windows tucked under an overhang can be left open without letting rain into the interior. And overhangs visually and physically extend shelter into the spaces lying outside the walls. This helps integrate and expand the house – and, of course, those who live within it – into the immediate surroundings.

Interior Spaces

The interiors of many contemporary cottages are surprisingly spacious. Judging from the outside of a house that abounds in diminutive architectural features and compact forms, you might think the inside will feel dark and cramped (which, in fact, many traditional cottages were). But few people today want to live in small, poorly lit rooms, cut off from one another. Instead, most of us desire as much light and space (or, at least, a sense of space) as possible. There is no reason that a cottage-style house, no matter how small or traditional in exterior appearance, cannot aspire to and meet these contemporary needs.

You can create the perception of spaciousness through well-lighted, open floor plans and the careful shaping of the rooms. Rooms can be joined for multipurpose uses, though areas can still be defined by changing the level of the floor or ceiling relative to the rest of the room. Built-in furnishings can give a house character and take wonderful advantage of limited space. And you can enhance the sense of abundant living space and further define areas through both the intuitive and thoughtful use of decor – not just the things, but their textures and colors.

Outside “Rooms”

By extending into its environment, a house becomes far larger than its enclosed space. Well-defined extensions such as porches, decks, and earthen terraces draw people out of the house, giving them an enjoyable place to merge with the outside. They allow the cottage, and cottage life, literally to expand in the warm seasons. These outside spaces also draw the house itself into the adjacent surroundings, helping it participate more fully with the site while anchoring the building to the earth. This increase of useful floor space comes at a cost, of course, but far less of one than if you were enclosing the space on a full foundation wall behind insulated exterior walls and roof. Outside rooms are one of the most economical ways to make a house feel – and be – larger than its footprint would otherwise promise.

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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.