Cottages.....

September 12, 2004
HABITATS
1 Cottage + 1 Cottage = 1 Home
By PENELOPE GREEN

HOW a house becomes a home and how that home shapes a life — these are the stories told by Kate Whouley's cottages. There are two of them, joined up like dominos, alike but not the same — married, as Ms. Whouley says — tucked among the evergreens above the edge of a cranberry bog near Barnstable, Mass., on Cape Cod.

Their history is the subject of Ms. Whouley's gentle memoir, "Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved: A Woman Moves a House to Make a Home," published this month by Commonwealth Editions. In it, Ms. Whouley, 45, deftly explores the themes of independence, pride of place and loss and shows how the achievement of owning a home can be bittersweet for a single woman.

"On the one hand, to have achieved this on your own, that's quite something," she said the other day, falling upon raspberry jam scones on the sunburned deck that joins cottage No. 1 to cottage No. 2. Ms. Whouley, who is a design consultant to the book industry, has loose, shoulder-length hair, an engaging grin and the preternatural youthfulness of her generation. "Yet as you continue to live in the space alone," she continued, "there is this sense of loss, of wondering if something's missing, as full as your life may be."

Nevertheless, a curious byproduct of home ownership can often be agency — providing the potent idea of accepting one's life as it is, rather than as it might be.

Ms. Whouley fell for the first cottage when she was 28 and working for a chain of book and music stores on Cape Cod. "You need some good debt," her young, entrepreneurial boss urged — and then signaled his diminishing interest in his book business by moving its offices to his concrete plant just as Ms. Whouley was moving in to her new house. The move made the office an inhospitable place to work, she said, so she left the job.

"My motive for being self-employed was that I loved the little house," she said. "It was a crossroads, a natural time to move to Boston or New York. I decided to stay." Just three rooms and 750 square feet, this cottage was a sea-coast icon, with white cedar shingles and painted shutters, window boxes and a white picket fence. Ms. Whouley had bought it for $102,500.

Its foundation couldn't support a second story, and in any case Ms. Whouley couldn't fathom disrupting her new landscape and its citizens, the cardinals and catbirds, turtles, woodchucks and quail. Instead, she squeezed her new life, and her new business, into three rooms. The business — advising the book industry on how to design its stores — went into her bedroom, though some of it, like the fax machine, spilled out onto the kitchen counters.

"I always had different schemes for expanding," she said. "At one point I'd had an architect draw plans for a series of pods going up the hill." Instead, her home, like her life, expanded inward, becoming rich in interior detail, fleshed out by personality, experience and necessity. It's a book-lover's house with a squashy couch to plunk down on, and rows of titles set against the unpainted planked walls.

Two old friends from Boston were her Mr. Fix-Its. The friends, Harry, a musician, and Tony, working on his Ph.D in social science, called themselves the Bog Boys and were happy for extra cash, toothsome political debates and "a Cape escape." They built bookshelves, spice racks and even a shelf outside her bedroom window for her cat, Egypt, to spring up upon and bang his head on the glass. In 11 years, Egypt's spring diminished, and the Bog Boys built another shelf below the first.

Cottage No. 2 had its own ad, late in 1999 in the Pennysaver Ms. Whouley reads in lieu of a daily paper — its stories are better, she says. The cottage was part of a cottage community in nearby Harwich that was about to be razed by a developer; the ad's come-on is the basis for the book's title: "Cottage for Sale, $3,000. Must be moved."

For the turn of the millennium, Ms. Whouley threw a party with a theme: each guest drew another's name from a hat, and had to divine the other's deepest wish. Musing on what her own wishes might be, Ms. Whouley writes in her book of her desire at the time to finish the novel she had been working on for five years, and move the cottage she has just met but with which she has fallen "deeply, irretrievably, in love."

"In some ways, the other wishes come with the cottage," she writes. "A place to write, the space for a man to share. As I wish for a successful cottage moving, I am aware I am wishing for much more."

A house move and resettlement makes great copy, with an eccentric cast of characters that cartwheel in and out of the set. (Living single doesn't mean living alone; Ms. Whouley writes of the "concentric circles of community" the cottages created.)

There's Hayden, the laconic mover of houses — his bumper sticker, "Save a Tree, Move a House," is now stuck on the bottom of Ms. Whouley's computer monitor; Vito, the (married) stone mason/fireman with soulful eyes; Ed and John and Peter, the firemen/builders who marry the cottages; and a handful of minor players from a state conservation agency, from the Department of Building, and from a crane company.

A house move gets a police escort, and its own street sign, which thrilled Ms. Whouley. In Yarmouth, on Route 28, she took its picture: "May 24. House Moving Today. Expect Delays."

She and two friends followed her new charge along Route 28, marveling at how Hayden used an enormous trident to lift sagging power lines, at how fast the cottage moved — 35 miles per hour. At home that afternoon, with the new cottage resting at the bottom of her driveway, awaiting the crane that will hoist it into place, Ms. Whouley was giddy and exultant. "I think I had more fun today than I have had in my entire life," she wrote. Harry looked at her quizzically, not sure if she's serious, and then said gently, "It was an awfully good time."

The cottage's ride cost $3,000; it cost more than $15,000 to make its foundation, connect the two cottages with a wide, skylighted hall, onto which the windows of her old bedroom and the windows of what used to the second cottage's kitchen look out, and paint it in the rich, saturated colors that Ms. Whouley uses in her work. The new hall is a deep curry called India Trade, from California Paints; her new office, which takes up most of the new cottage, is a dark turquoise Beacon Blue from Ralph Lauren. The cottage's tiny bedroom is Buttercup, a sunny yellow made by Crayola.

Ms. Whouley's trophy home is the anti-McMansion, a refutation of the granite-and-stainless set. She is living large by living small, and there's now a magazine for her. Cottage Living, a new title that hit the stands this month from Southern Progress, a subsidiary of Time Inc., is aiming squarely "for the woman who isn't as materialistic or aggressive" as the readers of the new shopping titles or the old shelter magazines, explained Eleanor Griffin, the magazine's editor in chief.

"We wanted to create a magazine for the way people really live," Ms. Griffin said. "We discovered that the power of the word `cottage' is very strong. Like `beach' or `chocolate,' it has very positive and magical connotations. And we're expanding it to mean not just a look but a whole lifestyle: informal, personal and romantic."

The union of Ms. Whouley's cottages is complete; her novel, nearly so. Her bedroom is finally just a bedroom. Her new office is light, airy and grownup. There's a long to-do list — paint the trim of the old cottage to match the new, build a set of outdoor stairs for the door at the end of the new hall, reshingle the old cottage in the same red cedar shingles as the new.

"The challenge becomes balancing your devotion to your home, which develops over time," Ms. Whouley said, "with your desire for another kind of job or another person, which takes you away from this place that you have become committed to."



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