cottage.
1. Small single-storey dwelling, sometimes with sleeping-quarters in the roof-space, inhabited by agricultural workers, built of cheap materials such as adobe, cob, pisé, rubble, etc., and roofed with thatch, turf, etc. During C17 many cottages were built for weavers, and some survive, with provision for looms and storage, e.g. at Sapperton, Stroud, Glos. Such once unregarded architecture was celebrated by James Malton (1765–1803) in his An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on Principle, that peculiar mode of building, which was originally the effect of Chance (1798, 1804), and Collection of Designs for Rural Retreats… principally in the Gothic and Castle Styles of Architecture (1802), which established him as a pioneer of the so-called cottage orné, a small late-C18 or early-C19 dwelling in the country or in a park, often asymmetrical and irregular, with small leaded windows, roofs, hips, gables, and dormers, fretted barge-boards, large ornamental chimneys, and rough timber verandahs supported by tree-trunks, part of the cult of the Picturesque. Construction was of brick, timber (or half-timbering), rubble, etc., and roofs were often thatched. So genuine vernacular architecture was taken up by architects, who created deliberately Picturesque buildings for aesthetic reasons. The fashion for the cottage orné was promoted in many pattern-books (including those by Plaw, who seems to have been the first to use the term, in 1795), largely in Regency Britain, but it also influenced Carpenter's Gothic in the USA. Other sources for such Picturesque designs included J. B. Papworth's Rural Residences …(1818 and 1832), and there were other publications. Good examples of the cottage orné, designed by Nash, survive at Blaise Hamlet, near Bristol (1811). A larger structure, in character resembling a cottage orné, set in parkland and used as a real working farm, is a ferme ornée. During the later part of C19, elements of cottage architecture were used for the design of dwellings by architects of the Arts-and-Crafts and Domestic Revival movements, but the results were far removed from the playful character of the cottage orné.

2. USA summer residence by the sea, in the country, etc., often quite substantial and well equipped.

3. Public convenience.

Bibliography

Barley (1961);
Clifton-Taylor (1987);
Hussey (1967, 1967a);
Lyall (1988);
Summerson (ed.) (1980a, 1993);
D. Watkin (1982a)

cot·tage / ˈkätij/ • n. a small simple house, typically one near a lake or beach. ∎  a dwelling forming part of a farm establishment, used by a worker: farm cottages.

cottage. XIV — AN. *cotage, AL. cotāgium (XII), f. COT 1, COTE; see -AGE.
Hence cottager XVI; see -ER 1.