Fairy-tale settings
American industrialist, and part-time anti-Semite, Henry Ford, certainly liked the English country cottage look. He tried to buy a whole street of them - Arlington Row, in the Cotswold village of Bibury. The terrace cottages have stood in the village since the 14th century (they were originally used to house sheep and were converted into weavers' cottages in the 1600s) but that didn't stop Ford from wanting to uproot them and ship them to the United States.
When his request was refused he went to the nearby village of Chedworth, bought the 350-year- old Rose Cottage and had it taken apart and sent to Greenfield Village, Michigan, where it was reassembled complete with an English cottage garden.
Those of us with shallower pockets than Ford will have to make do with visiting the verdant English countryside to look at them.
The English country cottage has become a veritable symbol of bucolic British life. The best examples are to be found in the Cotswolds, a largely rural area, incorporating Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and parts of four other counties.
So, what is it about Cotswold cottage architecture that captured the imagination of a hard-nosed motoring tycoon?
There's its charming simplicity, born of the organic materials - stone and wood - used in the construction. Indeed the honeycomb limestone from which the cottages are assembled seems to glow in that distinctive English light, providing an ethereal quality.
This, along with the steeply pitched gabled rooflines, prominent chimneys and low arched doors, gives the cottages a storybook feel, perhaps reconnecting us to the Hansel and Gretel fairy-tale cottages we heard about in our childhood.
Other Cotswold cottage elements include a roof of cedar, slate tiles or thatch (above). Casement windows are made with small panes of glass, resulting in relatively limited glazed areas, which is why the cottages are often quite dark inside.
A charming attribute is the way the rooms are often small and irregularly shaped, with the stone construction left bare, along with exposed chamfered timber beams and cathedral ceilings. Upstairs rooms have dormer windows and sloping timber walls following the form of the roofline.
One of the best examples of a Cotswold cottage on film in recent years featured in the 2006 romantic comedy The Holiday. Ironically, the home, belonging to the character played by Kate Winslet, was a fake, put together by set designers in a couple of weeks, but it garnered a lot of attention, with American audiences fantasising about owning such a quaint cottage in the wolds.
One of the leading exponents of the Cotswold look in the US was architect R. Harold Zook, who built them throughout the western suburbs of Chicago and the Midwest from the 1920s through to the 40s.
Zook put his own stamp on the style, adding cutout work to the window boxes and shutters, and developing a style of roofing (the Zook roof) using timber shingles to emulate traditional thatching. If it sounds a tad kitsch, that's because it was, and a world away from the progressive modernist architecture coming out of Europe and elsewhere in the US at the time.
No doubt Henry Ford approved.
