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English Cottages You'll Fall in Love With

A Guide to English Cottage Designs, From Tudor to Modern

By

Lisa Hallett Taylor

Lisa Hallett Taylor

Lisa Hallett Taylor is an expert in architecture and landscape design who has written more than 1,000 articles about pool, patio, garden, and home improvement over 12 years. She has a bachelor's degree in Environmental Design and is certified in fine and decorative arts appraisal.

Learn more about The Spruce's Editorial Process

Updated on 07/27/21

Fact checked by

Jillian Dara

Fact checked by Jillian Dara

Jillian is a freelance journalist with 10 years of editorial experience in the lifestyle genre. She is a writer and fact checker for TripSavvy, as well as a fact-checker for The Spruce.

Learn more about The Spruce's Editorial Process

Julian Elliott Photography / Getty Images

Cottage style architecture and interiors radiate comfort and informality; for many people this is the only kind of house in which they can really feel relaxed and "at home".  Cottages evoke cozy living: a crisp, clean, wholesomeness and back-to-nature sensibility for which they'd abandon their current urban digs in a heartbeat.

While some architects do a good job of producing modern interpretations, you won't find many contemporary home tracts built to look like authentic Tudors or English cottages. The look has been romanticized through magazines like The Cottage Journal and films like The Holiday, in which two women swap houses at Christmas. The house that most people fell in love with: Kate Winslet's fairytale-perfect Rosehill Cottage outside London, which was actually a specially built set.

12 Best Plants for an English Garden

Old English Cottage - Everything You Need to Know

These days, everyone seems to be fascinated with old English cottages. People love them regardless of what colour they are painted or what material is used.

And the reason why is that these cottages have a rustic, vintage vibe and a lovely, fairytale-like appearance that we feel and connect with. 

They also tend to be snug, cosy places with a sense of being a real home to someone.

Table of Contents

How Were Old English Cottages Built?

Old English cottages trace back to the Tudor and Stuart times in England’s history when the country was prospering, entering the Golden Age under Good Queen Bess.

Never had the country had it so good, and new houses popped up all over the country,  with amazing craftsmanship going into the buildings, particularly carpentry.

Most old English cottages were built around this time, particularly the half-timbered ones.

The cottage building boom ended in the mid-seventeenth century. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Queen Anne and Georgian-style architecture replaced what was seen then as the humble cottage. 

The English cottage dates back to a time of great affluence and of skilled craftsmanship by artisans. The houses were born in far simpler times before the Industrial Revolution came along and changed everything for the country, including the ways houses were constructed.

What is an English Cottage Called?

A traditional English cottage is called a Squatter’s Cottage.

Back in the 1600 and 1700s, English common law ruled that if a house could be constructed within 24 hours, with smoke seen rising from its chimney at the end of the construction day, then the ‘squatter’ who built that cottage could claim the land as their own.

This gave rise to what became known as a Squatter’s Cottage. It was typically one room upstairs and downstairs and then was later extended upon to become much bigger.

What Are English Cottages Made Of?

Old English cottages were built with any of the materials found in the local environment. The cottage constructor made do with what he had and learned the indigenous style of construction to his area. 

The majority of English cottages are built using locally sourced materials. Because they are built from the environment, they blend with the environment: traditional English cottages match the local environment so well as they are built out of the local environment, quite literally. 

Builders used materials they could find locally and became skilled with knowing how to build with the specific materials local to their area.

Cottages were built out of stone, granite, or cob cottages would be built from straw and mud if nothing else was available. The latter are remarkably resilient buildings.

The wood from the local trees were used (often English oak) for the cruck-frames and the house’s timber-frames. The half-timbered style house mainly dates to between 1550 and 1650, the golden age of English cottage building.

Most of the windows were mullion or casement, and the roofs were usually thatched. They were often made using post and beam construction, resulting in low ceilings, exposed wood beams, and a mud ground. The floors were eventually replaced by tiles put in a sand layer.

In the West Country, roofs were originally thatched and later tiled or shingled with blue slate from the mines. Because of this, old English cottages blend seamlessly into the landscape.

In England, thatch is made of lengthy straw harvested expressly for this purpose, and multiple layers of straw are stacked on top of each other.

Other materials used include water reed and combed wheat reed, again whatever was most local to the area.

Different Types of Old English Cottages

Cottages are available in a variety of forms, sizes, and designs. While they all have a special vibe and a feeling to them, you may find yourself going toward and choosing a specific aesthetic and style over and over again.

There are 6 different types of cottages you may recognise:

English Thatched Cottages

The thatched cottage is quintessentially English. Cottages made of this old type of straw roofing, are now greatly in demand by house buyers.

Because thatched roofs are so attractive, several new buildings are being constructed using them now, which is ironic given that thatching was traditionally associated with poverty.

Thatched cottages are a cost-effective and eco-friendly approach to insulate the home without having to pay for a real roof.

These houses are now a distinguishing feature of the English countryside and communities.

Yorkshire Dales Cottages

The Yorkshire Dales, or The Dales, are located in Yorkshire’s northern county. They are valleys and rivers with some of Europe’s most stunningly beautiful landscapes.

Upper Wharfedale, Malham, and the villages of Wensleydale are great examples where these unique cottages can be found.

Cotswolds Cottages

The Cotswold Hills has many beautiful thatched cottages, but it is also well known for the beautiful landscape made from the region’s characteristic honey-colored stone.

The Cotswolds are not like any other English area because of this stone, which gives the cottages there a warm ambiance.

Burford, Bibury, and Castle Combe are often considered to be the best examples of these special cottages.

Vicarages, Parsonages & Rectories Cottages

You can find a church in most villages in England, and nearby it would be a house for the vicar, rector, or parson.

Numerous of them are beautiful houses that have been underused since the church has shrunk (or even closed) and many parishes have been merged, with a lot of these houses having been auctioned off by the church.

These are currently incredibly desirable locations to live, typically serving as the village’s most magnificent cottages in the heart of the village.

Half Timbered Cottages

Timbered reinforced homes with exposed structural frames on the outside walls are known as half-timbered cottages. On a white background, they are usually dark in colour and form a beautiful pattern.

They are especially common in the West Midlands.

Fishermen Cottages

The houses where fishermen resided are a significant feature of several coastal towns and villages, particularly in the West Country.

Numerous of them are white, but sometimes they are painted in bright colours, and they make a wonderful sight now for today’s tourists who frequent these locations.

These cottages were terraced buildings built in lines leading down to the harbour since they were built in small towns and villages where space was at a premium.

A great example of these cottages may be found in Devon and Cornwall in places like Looe and Polperro.

Conclusion

The old English cottage experienced its glorious period with England, after which it was left to age like a fine wine, and it grows with elegance and beauty that is unmatched by any modern structure.

The narrative of the cottage might end here, but fortunately, it does not.

It is because of all the homeowners that carefully seek to restore and repair historic houses to their former glory form that we can still enjoy many up to this day.

Red house and old English style • Arzamas

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The Red House in Bexleyheath, England. Architect Philip Webb. Date of construction 1859-1860 © David Kemp / CC BY-SA 2.0

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The interior of the Red House in Bexleyheath, England. Architect Philip Webb. Built 1859-1860 © Ethan Doyle White / CC BY-SA 3.0

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Interior of the Red House in Bexleyheath, England. Architect Philip Webb. Built 1859-1860 © Tony Hisgett / CC BY 2.0

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The interior of the Red House in Bexleyheath, England. Architect Philip Webb. Built 1859-1860 © Tony Hisgett / CC BY 2.0

William Morris is a famous English designer of the 19th century. From him - more precisely, from his company Morris & Co., which produced fabrics for the interior, as well as wallpaper, stained glass and furniture - it is customary to begin the history of modern design. At the same time, Morris & Co. have an emphatically "non-modern" appearance and are stylized as the Middle Ages.

Morris and his friends - artists who collaborated with his firm - are usually called Pre-Raphaelites Pre-Raphaelites - a trend in English poetry and painting in the second half of the 19th century. In 1848, the artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The purpose of the members of the society was to fight against the conventions of the Victorian era, academic traditions and the senseless imitation of classical models, although this is not entirely accurate: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood disintegrated before Morris founded his firm, and not all of its employees were part of the Brotherhood in the past . Nevertheless, the aesthetic preferences of the first Pre-Raphaelite circle and the artists of the Morris circle were in common: they were in love with the art of the late Middle Ages. Morris & Co. items — free stylization of motifs and ornaments of the 15th century.

William Morris Red House is the debut of architect Philip Webb and the first building of the old English style. The new, although called old, style was contrasted by its creators with the imitation of Gothic, common in the 1840s. It was based on English rural cottages, unprofessional, anonymous architecture that slowly changed from century to century. It was not reproduced one to one, but slightly exaggerated by its characteristic features: chimneys were pulled high, roof slopes were lowered almost to the ground - and the houses took on a slightly fabulous look. To furnish the house to his liking, Morris gathered around him like-minded artists and found artisans , connoisseurs of old production techniques. This is how his company Morris & Co. appeared, and the house became a testing ground for it. Over the several years during which the Morrises lived in the Red House, repairs were underway there all the time: the walls were covered layer by layer with bright paintings on medieval subjects, the furniture was endlessly changed. But the modern interior of the house is deceptive: when, due to temporary difficulties, Morris sold the house, the furniture and decoration were almost completely lost.

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English style houses and cottages::EPLAN.HOUSE

Skip to content history of England. The most famous architectural styles in England are: Georgian style, Victorian style, Tudor style and Queen Anne style .

Tudor style appeared in the Middle Ages from 1485 to 1603, and possibly earlier, during the reign of the Tudor dynasty. A feature of Tudor-style houses are high gable roofs, sometimes covered with thatch, decorative elements made of timber, now called half-timbered houses, richly decorated front doors, chimneys decorated with decorative metal caps. The first floor is often faced with brick or stone, and the second floor is plastered and finished with imitation timber in the half-timbered style. Windows are usually tall and narrow. often grouped in twos or threes, rarely four. Sometimes faceted glasses are used, inserted into tin frames. Windows open outwards, sometimes with a lifting-lowering window for ventilation of rooms. The entrance door is paneled with a small window at the top, framed with stone or wooden architraves and closed from above with a small roof and is located asymmetrically to the facade.

The Georgian style of the house was established from 1714 to 1830 during the reigns of Kings George I, George II, George III and George IV, from which it got its name.

Early Georgian houses were rectangular boxes one or two stories high and two rooms deep. The windows were located strictly symmetrically on the facade, the porch with 3-4 steps was also in the middle of the facade, the paneled entrance door was decorated with a simple wooden casing. In America, most Georgian houses were timber-frame, but were sometimes built of brick and stone. Later, Georgian houses were more often built with two or three floors. The porch moved forward and gained a roof supported by columns. Venetian, arched and oval windows began to be used. Approximately half of the houses in the Georgian style were built with a simple gable roof, decorated with dormer windows. You can see how to build a gable roof here. Also in one-story houses, mansard roofs were used, or as they are also called broken roofs, in which the lower part of the slope was steeper than the upper one. Chimneys were symmetrically located on both sides of the house, and the windows were lattice, consisting of 9or 12 squares.

Victorian Style owes its name to the reign of Queen Victoria between 1837 and 1901, when the Industrial Revolution took place. Thanks to the industrial revolution, many building materials have become cheaper and more accessible, so various elements of facade decoration have become more common. English Victorian house plans incorporated decorative elements from the Gothic style, trying to make the house more beautiful than practical. Sometimes this style is called the style of Queen Anne, although this queen lived at the beginning of the 18th century. What does Queen Anne have to do with a style 100 years later? It was designed by the architect Richard Norman Shaw, also incorporating architectural elements from the King James and Queen Elizabeth period, who lived 300 years earlier.

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