The Cottage Orné is fun. The borderline between it and the folly is fluid, and the numerous examples in Roger White’s most attractive book are highly enjoyable. Few of us probably realised that there were still so many around, though the author must have tracked down most of them. He has discovered the architects and builders of a large number of them, and future editions and users of The Buildings of England will be the richer. But while the Cottage Orné appears essentially light hearted, perhaps the genre deserves more serious explanation than the author offers. It is the product of contemporary attitudes – of the late Enlightenment or the pre-Romantic – and, in turn, it illuminates the preoccupations that brought it about. As a departure from architectural regularity and rules, it cannot be explained in architectural terms alone.

The author cites fantasies by Kent, by Thomas Wright and Sanderson Miller as precedents, and their work does prefigure some of the stylistic elements of the Cottage Orné. The early Gothic revival, speculation about the mythical, proto-Classical ‘primitive hut’ and an idealised vernacular were all driven by not unrelated enquiry. But its style was the response of the moment to enduring needs. The hunting lodges of great men and the rural retreats of city merchants had long offered escape from more formal living or the confines of the town, and Classical writers provided models for the idealisation of the countryside and for a make-believe rusticity. The Cottage Orné is similarly a retreat and a vision, increasingly democratised, a sentimental invention responding to the values of the age.

The Cottage Orné is proprietorial: it announces its owner’s possessions and taste, his care for the well-being of his tenantry and for the scenic amenities of his domain. In the second half of the eighteenth century the agricultural landscape was being transformed by enclosure, and a well-ordered countryside was seen as the mark of a responsible proprietor. Yet, while enclosure was regularising his fields, his parkland was being transformed by Brown and his successors into a corrected version of wild Nature. While the productive farm was utilitarian, the landowner of taste and sensibility showed his feelings by ostentatiously naturalising not only his park but the buildings within it and the housing of his fellow men.

And Cottages Ornés would increasingly be patronised by another group of builders. Their numbers grew during the late eighteenth century alongside a prosperous and increasingly moralistic middle class. Its consciously untutored architecture and its lack of pretension proclaim domestic virtues. The Cottage Orné is the expression of a moral aesthetic that suggested what might be proper to degree, circumstance and place. It was the perfect form for villegiatura, as Roger White’s exploration of Sidmouth shows. But although it obeys no architectural rules, an essentially associational, common architectural language would develop for its building. Inasmuch as it follows precedents, these were chosen through sentiment and drawn from other cottages built in similar circumstances. Nor is it a coincidence that the rise of the Cottage Orné coincides with the birth of the novel. Just as the eighteenth-century novel was increasingly concerned with the sensibility of its characters, so the essence of the Cottage Orné was in an awareness of how people might react to it. Feelings, rather than rules, are central to both.

The decline of the Cottage Orné begins when, in response to this growing market, growing numbers of pattern books come to prescribe forms that the cottage might take. Appeal to models implies an anxiety for correctness, and is at odds with the inventiveness that is the Cottage Orné’s essence. Designs for cottages would ultimately turn towards the Gothic or the Tudor – to styles and to formulae that were themselves being studied ever more seriously. The Cottage Orné becomes increasingly correct and, as such, it starts to lose its individuality and to become part of a larger story.

The Cottage Orné deserves to be seen within the mental climate of its age: its builders did not set out to amuse later generations, but to put up buildings that they truly believed were appropriate to their uses and settings. But it is the very wit and variety of their responses to these requirements that give them their charm, and in describing and illustrating so many, Roger White has performed an invaluable, and much needed, service.