Decorating Cottage Style

Cottages are all about warmth and coziness?and here’s a book as welcoming as the style it celebrates. These pages hold the key to achieving that wonderfully laid-back cottage look, with its pickets and porch railings, time-tested color combinations, faded fabrics, family photos, and treasured collections. The pictures speak volumes about how old and new, pretty and primitive, can work perfectly together to create a welcoming retreat in any type of home. And all the ideas and projects are simple yet beautiful?whether it’s artfully antiqued furniture, whimsical birdhouses, button pillows to scatter everywhere, or a glass-paned door table.

Historic Richmondtown, Staten Island, New York City, New York, United States Seaman Cottage, constructed c. 1836-37 by developer Henry I. Seaman is a well preserved example of a modest Greek Revival cottage and a significant reminder of the early history of Richmondtown, the historic governmental center of Staten Island. Henry Seaman was an instrumental figure in the development of Richmondtown in the 1830s and this is the best preserved and most intact of the five houses that Seaman built on Center Street that came to be known as the “Seaman Cottages.” The term cottage was used in the 1830s to describe a newly fashionable building type, a small scale house with up-to-date amenities and modish detailing intended for middle class occupants. This two-and-one half-story side hall plan gable-roofed frame house retains its historic form and most of its historic detailing. Its design exhibits the simple forms and planar surfaces characteristic of the Greek Revival style and includes such notable features as a one-story portico, flush clapboarding, an eared and pedimented entry surround, simple molded window surrounds and a low dormerless gabled roof. Although many small, simple detached wood frame and clapboard Greek Revival Style houses were erected in the villages of Staten Island in the 1830s and 1840s, relatively few have survived in a good state of preservation making the Seaman Cottage an unusual survivor. Henry Seaman and the Development of Richmondtown Richmond County, encompassing all of Staten Island, was established in 1683 as one of thetwelve original counties of New York, with Stony Brook, now Egbertville, its official county seat.Previously, the residents of Staten Island had relied on the Court of Sessions at Gravesend, Brooklyn, for the administration of laws, while the center of political activity on the island was at Oude Dorp, near present-day South Beach. In 1711, the county government built a prison in the tiny village of Coccles Town. This was considered a superior location for conducting governmental business due toits location at the center of the island near the convergence of several major roads and the head of the navigable Fresh Kills. In 1729, Coccles Town was officially chosen as the new county seat and was renamed Richmondtown. A new county court house was constructed there that year. British troops occupied Richmondtown during the Revolutionary War, establishing quartersin many of the village’s buildings. They burned the court house and many other buildings on their departure. Little development occurred in the village during the next thirty years; however, the secondcounty courthouse was constructed on Arthur Kill Road in 1793. Richmondtown began to grow again around 1800 and was incorporated as a village within the Town of Southfield in 1823. By 1828, the first County Clerk’s and Surrogate’s Offices were constructed. A first-class hotel, Richmond County Hall, was built around 1829 and soon became a popular gathering place for political and social events.The village’s first public school opened about 1830. By 1836, according to the Gazateer for New York State, Richmondtown had three taverns, two churches, two stores, a small brick jail, the ancient county court house and twelve dwellings. That year, Henry I. Seaman, a New York City businessman with strong ties to Staten Island, hatched an ambitious development scheme that would more thandouble the village’s size. Born in Marshland, now Greenridge, Staten Island, Henry John Seaman (1805-61; usually known as Henry I. Seaman but sometimes as Henry J. Seaman) was a descendent of the Billopp andSeaman families that had been prominent in Staten Island affairs since the early eighteenth century. He became a merchant with a warehouse on Pearl Street in Manhattan and married his second cousin Katherine Sarah Seaman, daughter of the sugar merchant Billopp Seaman and Hester MaryKortwright Seaman. Katherine Seaman was a putative heir to the extensive Seaman-Kortwrightfamily real estate fortune. This enabled Henry Seaman to obtain capital for a number of business ventures. In addition to his development project at Richmondtown, these included real estate investments in Manhattan and in New Brighton, Staten Island. The Seamans resided in Manhattan until c.1840-41, when they settled on a family farm in Greenridge, Staten Island. Henry Seamanbecame a leader in the Whig political party on the island and was elected to Congress as the Representative for Richmond and Kings Counties in 1846. He was a director of the Staten Island Railroad (founded 1851), secretary of Port Richmond & Fresh Kills Plank Road Company (active inthe early 1850s), and private secretary to Governor John Alsop King (1856-57). At Richmondtown, Seaman purchased ninety acres of farmland to the east of the town center in 1836. Seaman had the land laid out into two new streets, Center Street and Court Place, and 119 building lots measuri

The house was built in 1981, we bought it in '99. We replaced original appliances, and updated the kitchen on a very small budget. Laminate floor, black Formica countertops, Refaced cabinets by Sears and brushed nickel drawer and door pulls from eBay.

"Perfect English Cottage" explores 18 inspirational homes that celebrate the best of cottage style in the English countryside. The book looks at the decorating and design solutions that make the cottages as attractive inside as out, as well as practical and comfortable to live in. Bestselling author Ros Byam Shaw takes a fresh look at this perennially appealing style, which she divides into five chapters: Character, Holiday, Romance, Simplicity and Elegance. The featured homes are incredibly varied, from a tiny house with exposed beams to a pared-down Georgian gem, to a picture-perfect cottage with roses over the door-and plenty more adorning the interior. Each section ends with a Get The Look page with ideas for recreating the style in your own home.