Victorian Cottage Residences

Andrew Jackson Downing

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780486142821
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-52), the first great American landscape gardener, was one of the earliest and most influential popularizers of something new on the American scene — the small, inexpensive detached house. Into a countryside dotted with log cabins and occasional Greek Revival mansions, he introduced the tasteful, efficient cottage residence in all its variations, including Gothic, bracketed, Italianate, and "rustic." His enormously successful books spread the gospel to thousands of home-buyers and many of his fellow architects — Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux, and others — and none was more successful than Cottage Residences, one of the most widely used books in American architectural literature.
First published in 1842, this book went through many editions before the 1873 edition, reprinted here, which contains for the first time the valuable additions of Henry Winthrop Sargent and Charles Downing. It is here that the author presents 26 different cottage designs with views, floor plans, textual descriptions and, occasionally, garden layouts. Among the different houses included are a suburban cottage, a cottage in the Tudor style, a villa in the Italian style, a villa in the Gothic style, a side hill cottage, a stone cottage, and more. There are also designs for a small rural church and Italian gardens. The 155 illustrations allow readers to see for themselves exactly what the designs entail.
For anyone interested in nineteenth-century American domestic architecture, there is no more important book than Andrew Jackson Downing's Cottage Residences. It is an incredibly rich firsthand source for the most popular architectural styles of the period.

DESIGN III.

A Cottage in the Pointed, or Tudor Style.

THIS edifice is designed for a situation on the bank of one of our boldest rivers. From its site the eye wanders over a richly cultivated country, dotted and sprinkled with luxuriant groups of wood; the wide, lake-like expanse of water, the sails floating lazily on its bosom, the tufted fringes of trees and shrubs in the foreground, and the distant hazy summits of blue in the horizon, are all fascinating elements of the beautiful, which make up the view from the point of its location. As in many of our finest natural situations for residences, nature has done so much here to render the scene lovely, that it would appear that man had only to borrow a few hints from the genius of the place, and the home features would all be rendered equally delightful. But how frequently do we see those who seem incapable of reading the wide and ever eloquent book of natural beauty, deforming its fair pages, written in lines of grace and softness, by rigid lines and hard mathematical angles, only too plainly indicative of the most primitive and uncultivated perceptions. Let us hope, by studying the character of the whole scene, to succeed better in improving a very small portion of it.

The arrangement of the cottage we propose for this place, differs from the previous ones in having the principal floor devoted almost entirely to pleasant apartments; the kitchen being below, and the bed-rooms above stairs. This renders the whole air of the house somewhat elegant.

Fig. 17.

Fig. 18.

A cottage like this, although of moderate size, in the hands of a family of taste, may be made to produce a beautiful effect. While it is true, that

“Here no state chambers in long line unfold,
Bright with broad mirrors, rough with fretted gold,
Yet modest ornament with use combined,
Attracts the eye to exercise the mind.”

And while there are no superfluous and luxurious apartments, nor anything requiring the attendance of a retinue of servants, there is much here, compactly arranged, to render a home pleasant and attractive. The neat and spacious parlor, eighteen by twenty feet (see Fig. 18), is varied in its outline by an old English bay-window, one of those pleasant nooks, which, says Lord Bacon, “be pretty retiring places for conference,” and has also windows opening quite to the floor of the veranda, and letting in a full expanse of the bright green lawn, and tufts of rich foliage that border it. This room would afford some scope for the “faire ladye” to exercise her taste in a simple, elegant, and harmonious style of fitting and furnishing ; not by bringing from the shops the latest and most fashionable patterns of city chairs and tables, carpets and sofas,—which, we are sorry to say, are in most cases destitute of all appropriateness, and, in many, of all intrinsic taste and beauty,—but by selecting articles recommended by fitness in design, in order that they may be in harmony with the character of the house, and by a tasteful and comfortable character, that they may suit the more simple and unostentatious habits of country life.

The dining-room is of equal size with the drawing-room, and as the family who are to occupy this cottage villa live in a pleasant and social neighborhood, and are in the habit, occasionally, of entertaining a little party of their friends, they thought it ...

Table of contents

• DESIGN XXVII. - A RURAL CHURCH.
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• PREFACE - TO THE DOVER EDITION
• PREFACE - TO THE NEW EDITION.
• PREFACE.
• Table of Contents
• ARCHITECTURAL SUGGESTIONS.
• DESIGN I. - A Suburban Cottage for a small Family.
• DESIGN II. - A Cottage in the English or Rural Gothic Style.
• DESIGN III. - A Cottage in the Pointed, or Tudor Style.
• DESIGN IV. - An Ornamental Farm-House.
• DESIGN V. - A Cottage Villa in the Bracketed Mode.
• DESIGN VI. - An Irregular Villa in the Italian style, bracketed.
• DESIGN VII. - An Irregular Cottage in the Old English Style.
• DESIGN VIII. - A Villa in the Italian, Style.
• DESIGN IX. - A Cottage in the Italian or Tuscan Style.
• DESIGN X. - A Villa of the First Class, in the Pointed Style.
• DESIGN XI. - A Cottage for a Country Clergyman.
• DESIGN XII. - A Villa in the Elizabethan Style.
• DESIGN XIII. - A smell Cottage for a Toll-gate House.
• DESIGN XIV. - A Cottage in the Rhine Style.
• DESIGN XV. - A Carriage-House and Stable in the Rustic Pointed Style.
• NEW DESIGNS FOR COTTAGES AND COTTAGE VILLAS.
• A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS IN ALL FIELDS OF INTEREST