The Oak Leaf Cottage was designed from 2014 to2015 by Atlanta architect Brandon Ingram. The shoppers labored with a design agency to create a small grouping of Traditional Southern buildings on their pristine North Florida acreage, together with a big major home and a secondary visitor cottage which was constructed first.
County ordinances required that the cottage constructing be not more than 800 sq. toes, so the driving design motive was to create a construction that felt as if it wished to be small, not that it needed to be small. The designers sought to create an impression of modest simplicity, highlighted by correct element and proportion.
The Oak Leaf Cottage is a research within the Classical Vernacular, itself a mirror of among the South’s finest qualities, the cottage is correct with out pretense, swish however not grandiose, and complex but refined.
The small cottage is simply half-hour exterior Tallahassee, Florida, and the designer knew it wanted to be two issues, extraordinarily environment friendly and tremendous Southern. The small cottage wanted to be extraordinarily environment friendly as a result of that is the second constructing on the property and county legal guidelines mandated that or not it’s not more than 800 sq. toes.
And it wanted to be tremendous Southern due to its setting, a bucolic 17.5 acres of land studded with dwell oak, pine, and magnolia bushes, excellent for afternoons spent on breezy porches.
To handle the cottage’s tiny footprint, Ingram was meticulous with its scale. When designing tiny houses, you run the danger of them trying like playhouses until you’re taking the proportions significantly, says Ingram. So the designer performed to a grander scale wherever he might, together with the scale of the home windows and the front-and-center positioning of the porch.
From there, it was a matter of including basic Southern particulars to incorporate a blue porch ceiling, a metallic roof, and lap siding. For inspiration, the designer appeared to each native historical past and examples from throughout the South.
They wished this home to be an imaginative interpretation of a number of styles of historic precedent, noting influential sources comparable to the long-lasting porches of Charleston, South Carolina, and outdated plantations.
In step with Southern traditions, the designer opted for a haint blue ceiling. Waterscape by Sherwin-Williams was used there and it was complemented with a smooth grey (Samovar Silver by Sherwin-Williams) on the ground. The porch was left unscreened to permit for max daylight.
All inside partitions are shiplap, painted the identical white (Benjamin Moore’s Swiss Espresso) to open up the area and play to the abundance of textures within the room. The all-white palette helps the corners of the rooms disappear, Ingram says.
The identical vintage brick from the outside frames the hearth, whereas reclaimed pine flooring add much more patina. The woodwork was designed to be humble in such a small area however the mantel was given barely elevated element.
Butted boards had been used on the ceiling so as to add one other layer of age to the primary room. There may be refined texture and character supplied by the wooden ceilings, because the boards will develop and contract barely over time, which is able to add to the impact.
Extra about this story may be discovered at: C. Brandon Ingram Design