Modern Cottage Design

How to update your cottage into a modern cottage interior?

Cottages are known and loved for feeling comfortable, homey, and timeless.

That doesn’t mean, however, that all cottages must have beige and white color schemes. Neither, for that matter, are all cottages Grimm’s Fairy Tales retreats filled with dark woods and dust-looking antiques.

Today’s cottages can look surprisingly contemporary—that is, of course, if you and your interior designer make the right choices. Remember that great contemporary design is all about achieving a less cluttered look, the smart use of materials, and a creative effort to achieve a truly personalized environment rather than a cookie cutter style you might see every time you open a design magazine to the latest cottage-themed article.

But don’t let the seeming simplicity of contemporary style trick you into thinking that it’s necessarily simple to achieve. A truly great contemporary cottage with a timeless feeling looks effortless only through a conscientious, professional design process that focuses on the smart selection of materials, textures, and colors together with a great space planning.

Bellow, we will be talking about how you can transform your cottage into modern cottage interior.

COTTAGE COLOR SCHEME.

For one thing, cottages typically have a neutral color palette—in other words, mostly whites and beiges if they’re bright spaces trying to look more contemporary, or darker earth tones if they want to hark back to earlier times for what they imagine to be a “cozy” look. Either way, such aspects of typical cottage style run the risk of sounding a little bit dull, don’t they?

Fear not! When it comes to fulfilling the dream of modernizing your cottage, you don’t have to use only neutral tones, whether light or dark, to achieve a comfortable, timeless cottage style. It’s possible to expand your range of options. Just be sure to keep the colors you choose within the same color family or tonal value, to ensure that they harmonize in the relatively small space a cottage usually offers.

Have a look bellow on the harmonious soft palette we used for a project in Orange County. A gentle blues and greens that visually expand the rooms while respecting hues popular in the past. We also included many light natural materials to enhance the fresh feeling of the interiors. Along the way, we also implemented more clean lines and soft curves that visually opened up the interiors for a fresh modern look that still respects the past. The perfect furniture & color palette choices underscore and enhance the impact of the design and create a cohesive contemporary cottage interior.

SMART CHOICE OF MODERN FURNITURE.

Traditional “cottage-style” furniture can range from rustic and rickety to heavy and traditional.

But nobody said a cottage has to be furnished with typically cottage-style furniture. If we want to create contemporary cottage style, it’s okay to be different, to personalize your cottage with furnishings that uniquely suit your own personality and aesthetic while also respecting the surrounding architecture of the cottage itself. Let’s look at some of the amazing modern cottage living room furniture!

OPEN THE SPACE.

Any small modern cottage interior can be enlarged, whether by smart choice of decor & furniture or by removing walls.

Many vintage cottages have smaller windows and more narrow doorways and other restricted interior passages typical of a bygone age. Again, many people call such features charming. Let’s be honest, though: Tight spaces and a lack of sufficient natural light can also easily lead to feelings of claustrophobia. 

Although we can adjust the exterior and create a modern cottage architecture during major remodel, for simpler remodel, we can stick with a cottage’s original windows, non-load-bearing walls, or other physical features that might make its interiors feel closed in. It’s entirely possible to change and possibly enlarge windows to bring in more light while respecting the cottage’s original architecture style. Two small rooms can be combined into larger, comfortable spaces. Doorways and passages can be expanded to feel more spacious, too.