Brookgreen cottage

Southern Living, Sep 2000 by Belden, Derick

At 2,214 square feet, this home lives much larger; reflecting the grand traditions and Lowcountry style of a fine old garden.

Sunlight drifts through a dense tree cover highlighting the muted tones of the home; nearby long-needle pines bristle in a soft breeze. Nestled on this wonderful Lowcountry site at Brookgreen Gardens near Pawleys Island, South Carolina, our Brookgreen Cottage lives its past in the present. The house takes a fresh look at design and offers inspiration on how we should live. And it's open for you to visit.

Spurred by architecture of days gone by, Brookgreen Cottage exemplifies fine design on a small scale. Conceived to integrate house and garden, this plan reflects many ideals that were important in our Southern past-and are becoming important again.

HISTORY POINTS TO THE FUTURE

As good land continues to disappear, a home's site becomes as important as its design or architecture, maybe even more so. Brookgreen Gardens has provided us a spectacular site: a plot on the edge of a pond graced by a canopy of 150-year-old trees.

Brookgreen Gardens is a 300-acre public garden set in the midst of a more than 9,000-acre wildlife preserve. Founded in 1931 on the sites of four former rice plantations by philanthropist Archer Huntington and his wife, sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington, Brookgreen opened as the country's first public sculpture garden. Today you can see more than 500 works of American figurative sculpture within its native, animal-rich landscape.

"We wanted to build a home to educate our visitors," says Larry Henry, president and CEO of Brookgreen Gardens, "and have them learn about scale and our past as well as a Brookgreen sense of style. We wanted to show how to integrate the home into a landscape, almost having it grow from the land."

At the same time, Atlanta designer Ryan Gainey was working on a cottage design that takes inspiration from its environment. "An architectural vernacular is well fitted to a site not because it's a given style, but because it's proportional to its surroundings, well built, charming, and pleasant," he says.

Combining these ideals took the collaboration of a fantastic team: Ryan, Brookgreen Gardens, architect Steve Goggans, builder Ron English, and interior designer Faye Harrington Altman.

ARCHITECTURE TAKES SHAPE

The genesis of design for Brookgreen Cottage (Plan SL-0009-280) was its floor plan, but the exterior also needed to blend beautifully with the setting. Steve Goggans, a Pawleys Island architect, took Ryan's concept and worked it into a family-friendly plan. "The most difficult task was to take the initial sketches and squeeze the spaces into the desired 2,000 square feet," says Steve. "Rooms have to be multifunctional to maintain a compact footprint." In fact, many rooms serve dual purposes in Brookgreen Cottage, and this will be part of our future as housing costs rise. The living room, for example, serves as a TV room, computer room, or dining room by appointing four corner cabinets differently. "This house has everything a 5,000-square-foot home has," adds builder Ron English, "only in much less area."

The home's interior details are refreshingly simple yet solid. "[Brookgreen Cottage] is different," says Ron, "but we didn't use anything you couldn't go to the store and buy. It's simply about being creative." The moldings and other details, all standard materials, are combined in innovative ways. "I find the house very peaceful because it is so simple," adds Steve.

A 15-foot-deep screened porch at the rear provides additional living and dining space with views of the garden. "Originally, we had 12 feet of porch," says Ryan. "But by making it 15 feet deep, the porch becomes more than a passageway to the garden. It becomes an outdoor room." Because it faces almost due south, the deeper porch produces shade for the inner rooms on hot summer days. In the winter, a lower sun angle strikes the concrete floor and helps heat the interior.

A steeply pitched roof and multiple dormers carve an upstairs out of what would otherwise be unused attic space. Steve worked in a brick band at crawlspace height to lessen the strong vertical push of the exterior's board-and-batten siding. "This band serves as the windowsills and other architectural elements around the house;' he says.

The combination of these familiar exterior elements that reflect the design of the Gardens comprises what could be called a Lowcountry-Brookgreen style. Larry says, "It's a culmination of the architecture you will find in the Gardens, our art of container gardening, and an easy living style."

INSIDE OUT

Brookgreen Cottage's interior draws its spirit from the surrounding landscape. "It's a casual, intimate setting," says interior designer Faye Altman. "This project was so appealing to me because it's a unique concept: showing good design and wonderful ideas in a 2000-square-foot house."

Sage greens and soft khakis act as a serene backdrop for the wonderful blooms of color found throughout the home. "We wanted cool, but not cold, colors," Faye says. "The main palette is taken from the landscape, but we also wanted to give visitors the confidence to do the unexpected by splashing in bright hues-such as the red poppies in the living room:'