The Cottage Journal features decorating ideas, style tips, creative inspiration, and delicious recipes - and now you can enjoy every single page on the tablet! Create a warmer, more magical home with the beauty of nature and The Cottage Journal!
“I treat the process like decorating. I do a mix of colors, textures, and sizes…I look for pumpkins with interesting organic stems, which happen to be on trend again.” –ALISON GIESE, Burke, Virginia Celebrating fall is in large part a celebration of coming home after summer’s dalliances and explorations. In this issue, we look at cottages that make home décor a reflection of travel adventures as well as passions for collecting and refurbishing. In “Clean, Serene, and Classic,” page 29, blogger Yvonne Pratt of Stone Gable American Farmhouse Living fills her home with tones of white from walls to accessories. The fresh style is a labor of love for Yvonne and her husband, who say they may never be finished with their home projects. For another creative DIY, don’t miss…
Ah bookcases! In many ways they define us. When I am at someone’s home I am always curious about what they choose to put on their shelves. It’s not being nosy on my part. I think of a bookcase as a résumé of the people that live there. They can hold a lifetime of stories—not just serve as a storage warehouse for books. Framed pictures that celebrate milestones and artifacts from family history or travels are a great accompaniment to share the space. As I’ve mentioned before, my husband and I have designed and built many homes together. We learned from our first house that bookcases were a coveted feature when selling the house. As a result, I have become a shameless hoarder of books. And with each new house,…
Yvonne Pratt has always loved decorating, but she realized early on that as much as she enjoys color in other people’s houses, she prefers the serenity of whites and neutrals for her own home. “I like a calm look,” she says. The spacious country home near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that she shares with her husband, Bobby, has a semi-open floor plan, so sight lines travel through several rooms. “You have to go through a lot of things visually, and you don’t want it to overwhelm you,” she says, “so the calmer and more neutral the palette, the better.” Even seasonal decorating obeys the quiet-neutrals rule. For fall, autumn leaves pressed between glass and a few pillows embroidered or printed with pumpkin designs nod to the season’s traditional earthy colors, but the…
Effortless, easy style happens, not surprisingly, with practice. As any designer will attest, it is a delicate aesthetic and balancing act that requires a sharp eye, an even sharper sense of restraint, and plenty of practical experience. In other words, practice makes perfect—especially when it applies to constructing a home. For Alabama, residents Pat and Dorie King, building a second home illustrates a picture-perfect case in point. A self-described labor of love, the project was a joyful collaboration of family and friends that took on a decidedly natural and inspired momentum throughout the entire process. “Because this was the second house we’ve built, we knew more of what we wanted and how to get there,” Dorie says with a laugh. Partnering with local residential designer and friend from college, Richard…
A garage with a carriage house above was supposed to be a temporary home for Patsy and Jeffrey Schmidt of Christiana, Tennessee. They would live there with their daughters, Emme Grace and Rayley Beth, while the main house was under construction. But when their third daughter, Maggie, was born with Down syndrome, everything changed. “I had a gift shop and did interior design for almost eleven years,” says Patsy, “and after I saw all the time the therapies were going to take, I closed it six months after she was born.” Without Patsy’s income, the couple couldn’t afford to build the house they had planned. Then inspiration struck: if they converted the garage to living space and flanked it with wings, they would have a classic symmetrical design that looked…
About three years ago on Halloween, the Meyerpeters family went trick-or-treating in a nearby community. “I felt like I was in a Charlie Brown TV special with the fall leaves blowing, streets lined with kids, and families literally bobbing for apples,” Katie says. It was right then and there she knew that this was the community where she wanted to raise their two children. She and Scott bought a small cottage that had been structurally redesigned by the previous owners. They had closed in the original porch to create a dining area with lots of windows, and opened the attic to make a playroom. As good as it was, it didn’t prevent Katie and Scott from adding their own touches. Within two years of living in the new home, they…
