About the Cottage Register

The Cottage Register is an informational publication about small detached cottages in warm climates. It is not a nursery, catalog, or store. We are interested in how these buildings are made and why they are placed where they are.

That interest started with travel. In the Minahasa highlands of North Sulawesi, we kept noticing compact wooden cottages set apart from the main house and surrounded by garden space. Back in the Southwest, Arizona casitas brought us back to the same basic idea in a very different climate.

We bring those two places together on The Cottage Register. The Minahasa side keeps us close to timber construction and garden siting. In Arizona, the same questions lead us to detached casitas. Shade becomes a bigger concern there, and the building choices change with the desert climate.

We write from the Southwest now, but the comparison still begins with what we saw in Minahasa. The climate changes, and so do the materials. What interests us is how a small separate building can make sense in either place.