|
|
Cottage Living
Drawing on age-old principles, Pennsylvania architect Peter Zimmerman designs a small house with big appeal.
Text by Logan Ward | Photos by Erik Kvalsvik
Peter Zimmerman designed this 2,500-square-foot cottage as the pilot house for a small community in Pennsylvania inspired by early twentieth-century cottages on the East Coast.
|
A house does not have to be big to possess the self-assurance of the finest old homes. Quality materials and careful craftsmanship build character and charm, regardless of a home’s size. Architect Peter Zimmerman, who is often called upon to create designs for large estate homes, recently got a chance to prove the point when he designed a cottage in Elverson, Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia.
“So many houses seem as though they’re trying to be architecture (with a big A)—the monument on the street,” says Zimmerman. “As with all of my houses, I wanted this house, although smaller, to be more about proportion, scale, and details, the close experience of the architecture by the user, not one of those houses that says ‘Look at me.’”
Ironically, the closer you get to the house, the harder it is to take your eyes off it.
The project came about when a developer asked Zimmerman to develop a concept for a small community of homes on a wooded golf course. The architect designed the pilot house for imaginary clients—an older couple downsizing from a large home. Like all the houses in the village, it was limited to 2,700 square feet of living space, including a guest apartment above a detached garage, leaving the cottage itself with little more than 2,500 square feet. Rather than bemoan the size restriction, Zimmerman—inspired by early-twentieth-century cottage communities up and down the East Coast—seized the opportunity to create an understated jewel with traditional detailing. More than ever, the architect had to draw on the timeless qualities of old houses to pull it off.
The interiors are contemporary, fresh, clean, and bright.
|
|
Zimmerman chose a simple cottage form—a pair of story-and-a-half boxes set perpendicular to one another with small appendages tucked onto each end. Two stories would have been proportionally all wrong, he says—too large for the setting. Though the plan worked, its small footprint left the architect very little residual space for outdoor rooms. “I didn’t have enough architecture to create a courtyard between one wing of the house and another wing,” he says. His solution? To use a short wall jutting out where the two boxes meet as a corner for a covered brick porch. “It takes three corners to define a space,” he says. “In this case, there’s one corner. The posts loosely define the other two corners. And the ceiling gives the porch a sense of intimacy.”
The architect had the cottage clad in handsome beaded cedar boards with a transparent stain. An extra-bold bead keeps the siding boards from blending with the unbeaded corner boards and door and window casings. Likewise, he added a water table skirt board to separate the fieldstone foundation from the clapboards. Other impressive exterior details: a custom-made cabinet to hide the electric meter, old-fashioned cast-iron boots to lift the porch posts off the brick, and a section of cupped brick to channel water beneath a downspout.
Inside, the architect worked to maintain the cottage scale while also making the floor plan more open and livable by today’s standards. The centerpiece is an airy, light-filled great room with a soaring ceiling held aloft by pegged fir beams. Modified Rumford fireplaces stand at either end—one facing a sofa and chairs, the other a dining table—their whitewashed walls slanting inward to throw heat back into the room.
Even more remarkable, however, are the subtle details Zimmerman added to give the great room intimacy, lest it feel like a vast dry-wall box. The rich, naturally finished beams frame a smaller peaked space within the larger expanse. An overmantel high above each fireplace forms a dividing line between the lower part of the room and the open “attic” above. Above that dividing line, the sloped ceiling and upper gable ends are beadboard (not Sheetrock), which adds texture and gives yet another visual clue that while the light may dance up to a height of nearly 20 feet, you’re safely ensconced before the fire in a space comfortable enough for two or three people.
A sitting room offers Colonial detailing, including this warming hearth.
|
|
It’s all about adding layers to a space, Zimmerman says. The beams are a spatial layer. The overmantels add a layer of definition, reminding people where the ceiling would have gone. He achieves something similar—the sense of an assemblage of rooms without the stuffiness—with an open hallway running the length of the cottage, from the informal family entry at one end of the house to the master bedroom at the other. “I tried to create multiple zones as you enter the house,” says the architect. “You step onto the front porch, enter the foyer, and then enter the hallway, the great room, and finally the back porch. This little house may be very transparent, but it’s not thin architecture.”
The hallway solved another problem open-plan houses have. “People want kitchens and living spaces merging together, but that can create real problems spatially,” Zimmerman says. “Rather than have the kitchen only separated by the thickness of one wall or no wall, I used that hallway to push it back. The kitchen and great room are still open and connected, but they’re not on top of each other, so that after dinner you don’t feel like you’re living in the pots and pans.”
The hallway gets repeated in the half-story above, along a gallery overlooking the great room. It leads to a pair of guest bedrooms and a bath. Here, as below, Zimmerman gets lots of mileage out of the long, narrow space. Awash in natural light from several shed dormers poking through the sloped roof, the gallery is lined with bookshelves, creating as much linear shelf space as a small dedicated library room. And the railing is ingenious. A row of wide boards with diamond cutouts, the barrier is both attractive and mostly solid, acting as a sort of half wall. Sit to read, and you’re in privacy; stand, and you can converse with those below. The railing’s posts alternate in height and thickness, creating a crenellation that stops the eye, clearly defining the public foreground space from the private background space—again without fully walling it off.
With these two hallways—as with the entire cottage—Peter Zimmerman proves that when it comes to good architecture, size doesn’t matter.
Logan Ward is a freelance writer living in Virginia.
Making the Most of a Smaller House
While size may not matter, when it comes to good architecture, it does make a difference. “In little houses, sometimes the rooms just bleed together, with no definition of individuality of spaces. It’s like a one-liner: You understand the house right away,” says architect Peter Zimmerman, whose 2,500-plus-square-foot Pennsylvania cottage (plus garage apartment) has all the richness and self-assurance of a home twice its size. Here are some suggestions from Zimmerman for overcoming a square-footage limitation.
Make simple but bold gestures. Architectural statements on small houses can’t be small and finicky. Take front porches, where ornamentation tends to congregate. Zimmerman placed his cottage entry under a single roof with a single eave line and a single dormer. “We created a nice overhang that’s out of the weather without having to tack on another porch.”
Be creative with outdoor space. A small footprint with little residual space means less opportunity for creating intimate courtyards. But because connecting to the outdoors is so important, the resourceful architect was able to create five small outside spaces, including the main covered porch, a postage-stamp balcony, and a small porch carved out of the master bedroom, which uses the edge of the nearby garage to add a sense of enclosure. The result? A small house with loads of charm.
Layer the inside. Floor plans these days tend to be more open and flowing and light-filled. But all that openness can quickly eat up the space in a small home, reducing privacy and projecting a flimsy quality (picture a private bedroom separated from a public living room by a single wall—a design no-no). Instead of tucking away the not-so-inspiring practical spaces—closets, a stairway—Zimmerman used them as connective tissue to give the small home a layered feel. Likewise, he placed architectural elements, such as posts and railings, to help define transitional spaces without completely walling them off, which would have choked light and flow.
|
|
|
