Thoughts for the Cottage Court Curious
Author: Eric Kronberg
Editor: Carrie Whitney
Cottage courts have been getting a lot of attention lately—and for good reason. At a moment when communities across the country are looking for ways to add more housing choices without losing the scale and character that make neighborhoods desirable, cottage courts offer an intriguing middle ground.
The idea itself is wonderfully simple: organize a relatively small group of homes around a shared outdoor space, rather than treating each house as an isolated object on its own lot. Done well, the shared court becomes an extension of the home—a place for casual interaction, play, gardening, or simply seeing your neighbors.
For anyone interested in the subject, we should start by giving credit where it is due. Architect Ross Chapin has done more than perhaps anyone to document, refine, and popularize this approach through his work on “pocket neighborhoods.” His book, Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World, is the definitive text on the subject and should be the first stop for anyone interested in digging deeper. Chapin’s work emphasizes the balance between community and privacy, with small clusters of homes organized around shared space and carefully designed transitions between public and private realms.
SO, WHAT MAKES A COTTAGE COURT WORK?
We recently went down the rabbit hole ourselves, assembling and studying cottage courts from around the country. Rather than simply collecting attractive examples, we wanted to understand their underlying geometry. We put the precedents at a common scale and compared court widths, block dimensions, number of homes, density, parking arrangements, and the relationship between buildings and shared space.
One of the first things that becomes apparent is that there isn’t a single cottage-court formula. Our examples range from relatively loose arrangements at fewer than five units per acre to compact courts exceeding 20 units per acre. Yet across the precedents, the average court width is remarkably close to 50 feet.
That doesn’t mean 50 feet is a magic number. What matters is the relationship between the buildings and the space they create. The court needs to be large enough for daylight, landscape, activity, and some breathing room—but intimate enough that the houses actually define it as a shared outdoor room.
Several other patterns emerge.
Fronts Matter.
Houses should face the court, street, or pedestrian space rather than turning their backs on it. Porches are particularly powerful because they create a transition between the public realm and the privacy of the home. Landscaping, small yards, low fences, and careful window placement can add additional layers of privacy without simply pushing buildings farther apart.
Parking Matters—A Lot.
One of the quickest ways to undermine a cottage court is to let automobiles dominate it. Clustered parking, alleys, and on-street spaces generally work much better than putting a driveway and garage in front of every home. The goal isn’t to pretend cars don’t exist; it’s to put them in their proper place.
Scale Matters Too.
Even on larger sites, smaller clusters can create recognizable neighborhoods within neighborhoods. Our work has generally pointed toward courts of roughly 10–16 homes as a useful scale, rather than simply making the shared space larger as more units are added.
Math matters even more. Cities often allow cottages courts in the same places they allow townhomes, and then wonder why no one builds cottage courts. The math is pretty straightforward. We typically see townhomes delivering 30%-40% more density than a cottage court. This means they can outcompete for land. If a city wants more cottage courts, they need to allow them in land that also doesn’t allow townhomes. This is essentially your low density, “single-family” land. Medium density will go townhome 98% of the time if permitted.
Perhaps the biggest lesson is that cottage courts aren’t really about cottages. They’re about the space between the buildings. Get that relationship right—the court, porches, paths, parking, privacy, and connections—and a surprisingly wide variety of housing types and densities can participate.
Our Cottage Court Case Study takes a closer look at these precedents, puts them side-by-side at the same scale, and tests how those lessons can translate into repeatable development patterns. For the cottage-court curious, we hope it’s a useful place to start.
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