The Ontario Cottage – Lynne DiStefano and Dan Schneider

Nominee for Stephen A. Otto Award for Research and Documentation

The Ontario Cottage: Perfect of Its Kind celebrates and documents Ontario’s most iconic small house — a one or one-and-a-half storey building with a symmetrical facade (a centrally-placed door with windows on either side), a hipped roof, and sometimes a porch or verandah.

With engaging text by Lynne DiStefano and Dan Schneider, superb photographs by Steven Evans, and charming architectural drawings by Ho Yin Lee, the reader is drawn into the history of the house form — its roots in England, Ireland, and Scotland and ultimately in Italy — and its late eighteenth and early nineteenth century appearance in Ontario.

But the book is more than a history of the cottage houseform. The authors demonstrate that its enduring appeal is directly related to its livability, its pleasing proportions and human scale, and how it reflects regional geographies and uses local materials. Style —neoclassical, Gothic, etc. — is mentioned but is relegated to its proper place as a decorative mantle on the persistent Palladian houseform.

Although a book about a specific type of small house, its reach is potentially much broader. As one reader has commented: “One of the changes it (the book) has made in me, interestingly enough, is that I look differently at houses everywhere.” And another reader considers the book continuing the “grand tradition” of books about Ontario’s emblematic architecture.