Fox Hollow, a new cottage built from antique materials | Murphy & Co. Design

An avid collector of antiques commissioned this small cottage to replace the rotting log cabin that stood at the entrance to her Minnesota property. She envisioned a garden cottage more in keeping with her 1920s Tudor-style house. The local government allowed the decaying structure to be rebuilt as long as the new design kept the same footprint and roofline.

Residential designer Jeff Murphy oversaw the project, basing the design on traditional English country cottages. To make the new cottage look like it had been built over a hundred years ago, he specified materials and construction techniques authentic to that period. The cottage has a post and beam timber frame assembled with joints cut by hand and locked together with wood pegs. The exterior doors are hand-made and the walls are finished with hand-applied plaster.

Most of the visible wood was reclaimed from barns dating back to the mid-1800s. The slate roofing is even older, originally covering a Pennsylvania barn built in 1810. The limestone used on the exterior was salvaged from the piers of an 1889 bridge in Minneapolis when it was replaced. Many of the fittings and fixtures came from the owner’s collection of architectural antiques, including the light fixtures, the distressed wood doors in the bedroom, the chimney pot and the lion tile used to decorate the front gable.

The 860 ft2 (79.9 m2) floor plan consists of a great room flanked by a bedroom wing on the front side and a shed-roofed “addition” at the back housing the kitchen and breakfast nook. Besides their structural role, the massive roof beam and support post help to define the different rooms within the open living space.

Enjoy the weekend!

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Photographs by Susan Gilmore Photography, courtesy of Murphy & Co. Design.

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