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Classically, cottage kitchens aren’t built for efficiency. Storage is scarce, dishwashers are often a fantasy, and counter space can feel like an afterthought. But what they lack in modernity, they more than make up for in charm; a cottage kitchen is the kind of space that wins you over completely, crooked edges and all. The formula is familiar: open shelving lined with collected ceramics, a large farmhouse sink, checkerboard or creaky wood floors, white cabinets with unfussy hardware, and copper pans on proud display. Add a well-worn table and a handful of colorful, deeply personal details, and suddenly the constraints start to feel intentional. In the best examples, upgrades are tucked in wherever they can be, without anyone being the wiser.
While not all cottage kitchens have to be situated in small, quaint homes, the ethos is what inspires us. From a pool house in Westhampton to a farmhouse in Arkansas, here are some of the spaces that have us dreaming of a charming, unfussy life.
The Whimsical Yellow Cottage Kitchen
Antiques dealer, furniture maker, and interior designer Max Rollitt spruced up this derelict gatekeeper’s cottage in Hampshire, England, featured in the forthcoming book Life Inside a Cottage by Nell Card and Rachel Vere. He made the place more functional—lots of hooks, tall cabinetry—without stripping away the whimsy, infused in large part by the liberal use of Farrow & Ball’s Sudbury Yellow paint.
The Rustic Artists’ Cottage Kitchen
Mustard yellow pops throughout this 18th-century black clapboard cottage in Kent, England, the home of two artists. With an intricate oak-vaulted ceiling and heavy oak table and chairs, the kitchen’s dining area in particular is full of handmade charm. “Cottages—perhaps more than any other type of home—seem to happily absorb the personalities of their custodians, accumulating layers of ordinary lives well-lived,” writers Card in Life Inside a Cottage, where this home is also featured.
The Nostalgic Cornwall Cottage Kitchen
Revived by design studio HÁM Interiors, this Cornwall kitchen, another Life Inside a Cottage feature, channels the best of cottage style: a vibrant Lacanche range, clever storage for displaying plates and copper pots, rustic details in antique cutting boards, and a dash of softness through striped skirts and English Delft tiles. “Cottages like to be colored in… Pattern is also perfectly at home. The main stipulation, it seems, is to care for your cottage. If you do that, the owners will tell you, it will care for you,” Card adds.
The Green English Cottage Kitchen
When Angelica and Richard Squire, the cofounders of U.K.-based design firm Studio Squire, ventured out to South Downs National Park to tour their client’s 1820s home for the first time, they didn’t anticipate the space being stripped of much of its character. Luckily though, the well-built kitchen made up for it. “I think it had been made bespoke and installed by the previous owners,” says Angelica. “It was really spacious with loads of cabinets and drawers and a huge island. The previous counters were looking knackered, so we replaced them with a tumbled granite, put new wood on the island, gave [the cabinets] a lick of paint, did new handles, and installed a hot water tap and a filter tap.”
The Tiny Cotswolds Cottage Kitchen
Designer Beth Dadswell, founder of Imperfect Interiors, and her family loved visiting the Cotswolds twice a year. So when her husband, Andrew, came across Armada Cottage, a 900-square-foot house for sale in the picturesque village of Charlbury, Dadswell got the itch to renovate—and thrift. “Lots of stuff is in its second, third, or even fourth home, which feels more authentic and like it has been collected over time,” Dadswell says. The small but functional kitchen was made on-site by Beth’s go-to millworker, and has no drawers. “I don’t really love the look of them, and they are more complicated and more expensive to make,” she explains. Instead, her silver cutlery lives on the worktop in vintage ceramic jam jars.
The Rustic Topanga Canyon Cottage Kitchen
“It was everything we wanted,” Lacy Phillips says of her rustic 1,800-square-foot, 1934 hunting cabin situated on an acre of land. The manifestation expert and cohost of the popular podcast Expanded spent countless hours scouring antiques sellers, vintage shops, and salvage yards for pieces to bring the home back to its original glory. Her prized find was a 1930s O’Keefe & Merritt stove that had been completely refurbished. Newer details—like the Douglas fir kitchen cabinets and matching open shelves—look as though they always belonged.
A Colorful, Small Town Cottage Kitchen
While Hannah Carpenter, an illustrator, photographer, and art director, initially felt good about a home filled with white walls, soon enough her 1923 farmhouse was all about color. After a stint living in Tuscany with her family, Carpenter was eager to incorporate dynamic details she had admired in Italian decor, namely vibrant painted millwork and window trim, fabrics in saturated hues, and geometric stone floors. Meta Coleman, a Salt Lake City–based interior designer known for vivid pattern- and color-mixing, became an asset for the colorful refresh.
The Pool House Cottage Kitchen
Former fashion designer Steve Fabrikant and his wife, Nancy, needed more space for entertaining at their Westhampton home. So, they turned the 20-by-22-foot garage on their property into a multifaceted pool house. Open shelving and a hard-to-miss cow collection send the kitchen directly into quaint cottage territory. “A guy I used to know who made buttons found out that I liked cows and he fashioned them into drawer pulls,” says Fabrikant.
The Subtly Americana Cottage Kitchen
Whether for the house itself or a kitchen island, jewelry designer Lizzie Fortunato will always wait for the exactly right thing. At the Bellport, New York, vacation home she shares with her husband—renovated in collaboration with Kate Towill of Basic Projects—she was on the hunt to find a vintage draper’s table she could repurpose. During a late-night scroll on Jayson Home, she stumbled across a 1800s-era French version with the perfect dimensions, and though it took some time to get it delivered, now it’s the piece that everyone gathers around.
The Fairytale Cottage Kitchen
Beau Ciolino and Matt Armato, the DIY design duo behind Probably This, initially planned a light renovation to transform this blank slate on their East Tennessee property into a rental cabin. But, the project quickly became so much more. Luckily, the previous homeowner had stashed solid wood 1950s cabinets in the basement after a main-house reno. The duo hauled them downhill, and Armato “chopped them up and Frankensteined them together” on site. Soon came a custom Delft-style backsplash and yellow kitchen cabinets, an homage to the patch of chanterelles that grow near the home. In the end: a fairytale.
The Saturated Swedish Cottage Kitchen
Cassandra Rhodin, founder of Mini Rodini, has spent years painstakingly bringing her 1890s home in the Swedish countryside back to its original state. Her family spends most of their time hanging out in the kitchen—making art projects, watching Rhodin’s eldest son test out new recipes, or simply catching up. “It’s a house that’s not made for showing off,” Rhodin muses. “It’s a house we live in.”
The Oak-Clad Yorkshire Kitchen
The kitchen of Lee Thornley, founder of U.K.-based handmade tile manufacturer Bert & May, and his partner, Phil Brocklebank, doesn’t necessarily stick to a Yorkshire aesthetic. While it was important to the couple to pick materials that appear to be as old as the 150-year-old Georgian house itself, they also made sure to combine materials and elements inspired by their travels. Think: thick Bejmat floor tile handmade in Morocco, which looks straight out of a Mediterranean villa.
The Candy-Coated Cottage Kitchen
Nick Spain teamed up with cookbook author and creative Dan Pelosi to design a kitchen and pantry that would blend seamlessly with the rest of the creative’s chromatic Hudson Valley home. Together with architect Stephanie Lee and contractor William Tyroll, the pair decided that the original space’s disrepair presented an opportunity to complete the home just as Pelosi wanted. During the design process, Lee and Spain called on ramshackle New England farmhouses, midcentury West Coast ranch architecture, and Pelosi’s Italian roots to inform their decisions. “We imagined the interior as though some kind of older woman had come into this old farmhouse during the Women’s Lib movement and decided to give it a redo,” Spain says. “It very much feels like taking the Grossy brand through a time machine.”
The Pint-Sized Coastal Cottage Kitchen
Hoping to maximize the floorplan of her 1,183-square-foot cottage in a coastal Massachusetts town, Jennifer Chambers brought in designer Kate Daskalakis of KSD Designs, who came up with a renovation plan that was equal parts architectural and atmospheric. In the kitchen, the goal was to enhance, not overhaul, which meant keeping the existing cabinetry. Light-touch upgrades—coating the cabinets in Farrow & Ball’s De Nimes, dressing the walls in a fruit print wallpaper by Morris & Co., and bringing in DeVol hardware and antique Shaker stools—did the trick.
The Peachy Pink Cottage Kitchen
The inspiration for DeVol’s creative director Helen Parker‘s Victorian kitchen renovation? A painting by Wendy Prather Burwell. The teal edge of a plate featured in the artwork directly informed the backsplash, while the picture’s soft, peachy pink backdrop is mirrored on the walls and ceiling, both painted Farrow & Ball’s Setting Plaster. Wanting the new floor to feel authentic, Parker landed on a checkered marble pattern by Floors of Stone that felt grand yet timeworn. “It’s where I spent my money and where I knew I had to get it just right,” she says.
The Sleek and Useful London Cottage Kitchen
Charlotte and Angus Buchanan, cofounders of Buchanan Studio, treat their Edwardian townhouse in London as a working laboratory. Exhibit A: the restaurant-grade, stainless steel everything kitchen. “It’s not a mistake that every commercial kitchen in the world uses [steel]. It’s the most amazing material,” says Angus. Skylights overhead, a heated concrete floor underfoot, and a pantry countertop boasting a striped skirt fill the space with warmth from all directions.