Life Inside a Cottage

What exactly is a cottage? Is it a building of a certain size or age? Does it need four symmetrical windows, a central front door and a chimney peeking out of the top? Should it be made from certain materials? Does it need to stand alone in a rural setting? Can cottages exist in cities?

… so opens Nell Card and Rachel Vere’s wonderful new book Life Inside a Cottage

It is a really beautiful anthology of humble dwellings, exploring the romance and fairy-story quality of these most archetypal of homes. Above left here you see the beautiful pea green wooden lean-to in Spring Cottage in the Cotswolds, and on the far right is the wonderfully calm interior of a Japanese cottage built in the woods.

Mr P and I were so happy to have our little south London cottage included alongside such a lovely collection of these charming and modest homes - old and new, rural and urban, made of stone, wood and brick.

There is beautiful imagery throughout the book - I particularly love the twilight shots dotted through the narrative. Each cottage is shot by a different photographer, but all the imagery shares a really lovely sensibility.

Above here you see our little place, just as the night draws in and the streetlights come on. I love coming home up the hill each evening to the beckoning glow.

The moment we first saw our little cottage, surrounded by its garden we knew it was something special. There is something other-wordly about its diminutive proportions. The cottage is a lot older and smaller than any of the other houses on the street, but for me and Mr P and our cat Kenneth it’s perfect.

Photographer Ellen Hancock has caught our place with such sensitivity - capturing the magic of the place.

I leave the final word to design titan Kevin McCloud:

A timely and delightful celebration of how to live with ‘just enough’ - a guidebook to humility in design.

Life Inside a Cottage by Nell Card and Rachel Vere.
Published by Quadrille

Life Inside a Cottage is featured in the Toast Book Club here