Requiem for Cottage Living

This week we got a note in the mail telling us that Cottage Living would no longer be published. Though the news has been received with sadness, I can't say that I don't understand it. The magazine suffered from a couple of challenges.

It had a bit of a divided personality - on the one hand, it was a periodical dedicated to the notion that small houses are eminently livable. It celebrated the visions of the New Urbanism, a vision of dense, walkable, mixed use urban areas with a heavy dose of public space, without being a journal for professionals. It celebrated a particular architectural style, the cottage style: houses on a small scale, oriented toward the street, houses that felt both cozy and inviting, secure and approachable. In other words, it was a magazine about the way a house interacted with other houses, how it formed part of a social fabric.
It was also a decorator/rehabber's magazine: how to make over a little kitchen, how to add a second story to a 900 sq. ft. bungalow. Those articles bored me to tears. We spend far too much time indoors to begin with; articles on decorating are just part of the addiction. Adding space usually just results in room for more stuff that has to paid for with more time at work, or another person working.
But the neighborhood stuff I really got into. I have found no other magazine that would concede, let alone champion, the notion that houses are not stand alones. (Kunstler's observation in Home from Nowhere that American home design is limited to two options - the manor house on the estate, or the cabin in the woods - is played out in just about every house periodical on the stands.) Apparently now there is none to be found.

I suppose they went the way of many magazines in an internet age. The smaller ones, the ones that are less focussed, the newer ones, will fail. But the failure of this one hits me hard; as if the voice of a different way of thinking and seeing has been lost, the voice of the Resistance, and we're back to a one party system: house as retreat from the world, and filled with retreats from others in the house.
And, I suppose that advertising revenue would be hard to come by for a magazine valuing simple, small, and - gasp! - old homes, valuing the quality of life that emerges when neighborhoods function as interdependent economic units (if your house doesn't have room for a snow blower, that might prompt the un-growth notion that you could share one with a neighbor - or several), and valuing the uniqueness of places, the adaptation of homes to their surroundings, instead of a mass-market sameness.

But who will alert me, as Cottage Living did, to the existence pocket neighborhoods? About the re-emergence of neighborhoods on the Gulf Coast after Katrina? About the ten best new neighborhoods?

As I blubber at this casket, I am reminded that sometimes a death prompts an even more vigorous rebirth. Let's hope.