Unique American Cottage Homes - Explore Charming & Cozy Dwellings | Perfect for Vacation Rentals & Countryside Living

This delightful book is chock full of carefully planned cottage designs, and it clearly illustrates how skilled and caring architects can combine ordinary materials and proven techniques to create simple yet elegant houses that are lovely to behold and a source of great pride and enjoyment to their owners. Tolpin has a keen eye for good design, and in this book he presents an wide assortment of carefully thought-out cottage homes. Furthermore, he explains what the designer was trying to accomplish in each house, and how each design works to accomplish its purpose. In the book's final chapter, Tolpin illustrates the difference between visually pleasing doors and windows of well-executed designs and the dull and ugly holes that pass for windows in many contemporary designs.My wife and I have had the pleasure of living in two different architect-designed custom homes that were built in the early twentieth century, and although we knew that the older homes "looked good and felt right," in many cases we simply didn't understand why we identified so strongly with the older houses. This great book has helped us understand why.