There is such a word as “cottagecore.” An Internet-born term—later popularized on TikTok—it describes a romanticized vision, often that of an upper-class city dweller, of rural life. Milkmaid dresses. Wildflowers. Homemade bread. And, yes, a cozy cottage. It’s an aesthetic that Nancy Meyers mastered in The Holiday, a movie whose English-countryside setting has served as a blueprint for the online trend. But the escapist fantasy goes way back. As the snobbish Robert Ferrars says in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, “I am excessively fond of a cottage; there is always so much comfort, so much elegance about them.” Three new coffee-table books round out that picture.
Quadrille’s Life Inside a Cottage doesn’t keep us guessing. From bare-stone exteriors and brick floors to open shelves lined with teapots and kettles and striped walls framing a fireplace, the book is a study in humble interiors. Whether the dwellings are in Kent, Perth, or a small village in Japan, all are united by their lived-in atmosphere, the “layers of ordinary lives … locked into the fabric of their homes,” as well as a shared embrace of child-like whimsy. As the book suggests, the yearning for cottage living “springs from the stories we are told as children.” (Though no one is finding three bears or a carnivorous witch behind the door.)
