About Rosebud Cottage

Rosebud Cottage was born out of my dreams.  I've loved houses, especially tiny houses, all my life.  While all my friends were playing with dolls, I was making up house plans for them to live in.  I continued to sketch houses and think up house plans into my adult years and eventually went to school to study Architectural Technology as a result.  I worked for many years as a structural drafter before I left the field to pursue other interests.  

Small spaces have always intrigued me, from the cubby hole in my bedroom to backyard sheds and play houses.  I loved reading about tiny homes in books such as "The Outermost House" (Henry Beston), "Walden" (Henry David Thoreau), "Little House in the Big Woods" (Laura Ingalls Wilder) and others.  In the early 1990's, I discovered a book called "Tiny Tiny Houses" by Lester Walker.  The book was tiny too!  I was enthralled and it wasn't long before I was dreaming of my own tiny house.  I started off designing tiny beach houses along the line of The Outermost House or some of the ice fishing houses I'd read about.  

But it didn't seem that it was quite enough space to really live comfortably in.  So I made lists (my other obsession) of all the things that I thought I would want to have around me and designed Rosebud Cottage!  On days when life got a little overwhelming, I would come home and retreat into the details of creating Rosebud Cottage.  My children also became enamored of Rosebud Cottage and for birthdays and Christmas would give me gifts like a tool belt and 2x4's to facilitate creating the real Rosebud Cottage.  While that still has not happened, I still dream about it. 

When we had our house fire in 1999, the thing I was most scared to lose was the notebook containing Rosebud Cottage's plans, lists and sketches.  How grateful I was that it was found, only lightly smoke damaged.  Years later, it is still among my most treasured possessions.  

I still dream about building Rosebud Cottage one day.  The plans have gone through several revisions, but my favorite version is still the one with a cupboard bed in the living room and a little conservatory off the kitchen.  It's a little jewel box of a home.  Big enough to contain the essentials, small enough to be quick to clean and care for as well as encouraging a life lived out of doors, yet providing a cozy, comfortable retreat.  

Since then, I've designed many other little cottages and cabins, but Rosebud Cottage is the one that draws me back time and again.

Here, at Rosebud Cottage, I imagine my life, 

pared down to the necessities, the simplest of needs.  

It is the repository for my hopes and dreams!

Exterior sketch of cottage along with an imagined landscape plan done in watercolor.

 The floor plan of Rosebud Cottage.  The cottage is 12'-0" x 24'-0" including the conservatory.  With the bay window, the square footage comes in around 300 square feet!

This is an elevation view showing a cross cut in the living room looking towards the bay window.

The conservatory shown in an exploded view of three sides looking towards the kitchen door.