Few things do more to set a homes character than its scale. And in the cottage, people have for hundreds of years found a home that is inviting, without being ostentatious, modest without a feeling of confinement. Doug Keisters photography brings to life 500 cottages, organized by style, including English, storybook, bungalettes, Victorian, and Spanish-influenced casitas.

Introduction

Storybook cottages

Casitas

Bungalettes

Period revival cottages

Victorian cottages

Eclectic cottages

Scholars tell us that cottages are small romantic dwellings, usually scaled down and less formal counterparts of larger, more ostentatious residences. Thus, compacted versions of looming, gingerbread-festooned Victorians become Queen Anne cottages, Carpenter Gothic gems, and Italianate mini-palaces. Rambling Spanish style mansions become Casitas; Arts and Crafts extravaganzas are compressed into Bungalows; and European castles become charming Storybook Style cottages. The allure of the more relaxed cottage lifestyle is so strong that even late nineteenth century titans of industry built 70-room "cottages" that lined the streets of fashionable Newport, Rhode Island. To be sure, their Gilded Age mega-cottages were hardly the simple romantic homes most think of when we dream of these tidy homes, but strictly speaking, the summer cottages of the Vanderbilts and Astors were scaled down and less formal interpretations of their over-the-top urban mansions.

I grew up in a cottage. My boyhood home sits on a quiet tree-lined street in Lincoln, Nebraska. The construction and architecture of my family's postwar cottage is absolutely unremarkable, although if one squinted just right, the house had the vague look of a Cape Cod cottage. It was one of thousands that were hastily erected in the aftermath of World War II to house the newly minted families produced by the returning GI's and their wives. Everything about that tidy home was compact, from the single-car garage to the Formica sheathed kitchen to the spare bedroom shoehorned into the attic. For three young boys it was more like a playhouse, far different than the larger ranch-style homes owned by some of our relatives with their off-limits-for-kids areas. No areas of our home were off limits; we used every square foot with abandon. And that's what makes a cottage so wonderful. It's a home that gets used; it's family; it's mom and apple pie; it's home.

The appeal of a cottage has never been stronger than in the hurried and harried twenty-first century. In an era of McMansions, celebrity palaces, and country castles that may make us gasp in awe and scratch our heads in amazement, there is something wonderfully enticing about a modest little home that simply makes us smile.

—Douglas Keister, Chico, California