one element of our design that i was so excited to incorporate, one i adore on my travels to italy this year, timeless and grounded was the use of stone on the exterior. how to do that in a way that felt like it had been here for years and also helped with an element of our design that changed: the walkout basement.

this is where polycor hardscapes came into play. If you’ve been following along with our home build process you know that I did not want a walkout basement. Primarily for the added costs and the change to the exterior of our home. I wanted our home to feel nestled into the hillside, a part of the landscapes and to walk off the porches into the prairie. We still have that feeling on the north front porch and the west back deck. But because of the slope of our site, the eastern exterior of the house needed a walkout basement.

enter exterior stone. If we were going to have a three story view of the house, I really wanted to ground this element, cut the visual so it wouldn’t be wall of siding, and make this element feel like it had been here for ages, and turned to old farmhouses for inspiration. We went with vertical board and batten siding and horizontal siding to further cut the feeling of an elongated side.

We bought our cottage for the gardens, for it’s proximity to the local co-op, and the gardens. Over the past four years, it has been a slow but steady process of making the space ours. We bought this home from the granddaughter of the original owners who designed and built this house. There are still a good many half-done, unfinished projects with this house, aka our exterior paint (sorry neighbors). Our kitchen was the first project we took on and this bathroom is our last.