The simple beach cottages which dot Southern California's sunset coast are the material of romance. Native Southern Californians believe that these cottages originated locally. Laughably tiny, even dollhouse-like, often sagging, faded, and peeling due to disregard, the clapboard coastal cottage house plan homes occupy many beach communities from Laguna Beach to Venice and beyond. Many people look down at these boxy and low profile cottages, which are a haphazard mix of Spanish, bungalow, and Cape Cod architecture. They are just a tad above shanties, and they reflect a time when people had to do with less and were jammed up together. Nowadays these dwellings, barely of a size to be considered homes, are the nests of college kids, surf bums, or the local psychic reader, rather than residences for grownups.
In the nineteen-teens and -twenties, English country cottage house plans on the Southern California coast were mainly built as second residences for well-heeled inland-city folks from the likes of Pasadena or Hancock Park. Coastal residences were popular as summer refuges for city folk, since the cool ocean breezes were a welcome respite in the hot days before the advent of air-conditioning. In California cottages were built inland as far as the cool onshore breezes extended. Coastal cottages are actually described better by the term coastal-weather cottages.
Beginning from the elaborate early country house plans cottages of wealthy city-dwellers, the building of cottages exploded with the developments and tracts in Los Angeles and beyond. One famous example is Abbot Kinney´s Venice - a planned community built at the beginning of the twentieth century - with its fanciful canals. Kinney was a tobacco magnate who had himself built a cottage near Santa Monica prior to his grand vision of building a kind of European carnival resort on the coast of Los Angeles.
Nowadays most cottages serve as year round homes, so their occupants must make this adjustment. Cottage life is a matter of being outside rather than inside the home - on the patio or the porch, out to the neighborhood, over to the local coffee shop or mall, and out to the beach. California coastal cottages are not places of hide-out in which their residents shelter themselves from the outside world. Rather, they are places out of the rat-race of the city proper which are turned seaward for inspiration and stimulation. This is the feel of real California living - being part of a beach community, living in a beach cottage. Cottage living is for the young at heart to soak up a little sun and surf; and feel the breeze on their faces. It's for people who make a priority of feeling the sand and waves beneath their feet; and who enjoy hanging out in the evenings. It's a lifestyle rather than an architectural style.
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