What is Southern Cottages?

Happy New Year!

 

You might wonder what Southern Cottages is and what this blog is about.

Mike McLeod, an architect in North Carolina, owns an architecture firm called Michael R. McLeod Architect, PA.  He has a small side company called Southern Cottages House Plans.  It is there that he sells a few of the house plans he has designed over the years at a fraction of the cost of designing a custom home.  So, potential customers can get house plans that were designed by an architect but at an affordable price.

This is from the Southern Cottages website:

Southern Cottages is a house plan service offering architect designed houses, cottages, and beach houses for a gracious informal lifestyle. The plans are a collection of exciting home designs which blend traditional southern coastal home styling with more contemporary architectural forms and open plan floor layouts.

What you’ll find on this blog are pictures of the SouthernCottages houses, FAQ, customer letters, info on building materials, and other information about architecture, the beach, and houses.

I hope this post has shed some light on this blog.

Here’s to a brilliant new year!

A Copper Dream

Patina is one of the words I learned in architecture school.  It’s a compact and fancy word to describe something we’re all familiar with:  the oxidation of a material that results in a change of its color.  The most common material that patinas that's used as an architectural element is copper. 

Copper is one of those amazing materials I’ve dreamt of using on a building, but have not yet had the opportunity to use.  When it first goes on it’s a pretty metallic peachy color, which looks good on its own.  Then, over time, it slowly changes to the beautiful blue-green.  The variegated color that results gives so much character to a building.

Here are some structures that have a beautiful patina:

Statue of Liberty

Copper Dome

Clock

Medac Building

A modern-day example: The Medac Building (above) is one of my favorite buildings in Wilmington, NC.  The variation in color of the copper panels creates movement along the facade.  It's a nice surprise in the sea of mundane buildings.

-S.L.