The Cape Cod Cottage

Casa Bella on Belmore Avenue, July 2021

I think of cottages as being cosy places and there is a lot to say in favour of being cosy. For years I've read detective novels and it's the cosy detective novels that are my favourite, this includes Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot novels. There are hard boiled detective novels but, basically, the detective genre lends itself to being cosy; Dorothy L. Sayers' Peter Wimsey novels tend to be long-winded but to some extent they are cosy. Are Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, or Colin Dexter cosy? They may not have cosy content but they are excellent to read on a winter afternoon when you have little to do but stay in-doors and drape a blanket or throw over your legs while lying on the couch. That is cosy.

A cottage is cosy because by definition it's small while a house is a house is a house. We don't speak of an English country house, it's an English country cottage; a house suggests something bigger than a cottage. A house is not cosy but it can have cosy rooms in it, a cottage should be nothing but cosy. Our home, named Casa Bella by my wife when we moved here, is one of many cottages all looking the same and built for returning soldiers after World War Two; it was inexpensive at the time and these cottages were called, euphemistically, five and ten houses, in other words, alluding to the old five and ten cent stores, Kresge's and Woolworth's, and they sold in the 1950s for anywhere between five and ten thousand dollars. A house is meant to house people, a family, so its primary purpose is functional and it isn't necessarily warm and cosy; these post-War cottages were functional and also housed families, they were a way to help veterans get started in life, they were starter houses. We bought our cottage in 1997 just after the second referendum for Quebec's independence or separation from Canada; real estate agents couldn't give houses away in those days because when there is political instability house prices collapse; instability in society threatens the value of people's homes.  

These specific cottages, I am referring to post-war cottages including the one in which my wife and I live, were called Cape Cod cottages although they have nothing to do with Cape Cod, but a Cape Cod cottage refers to certain characteristics of the building; the cottages were meant to house two adults and their two children, they are detached, they have one and a half stories and a basement that one day can be finished, they have maybe 1200 square feet, and they have a backyard. The construction of these cottages was mostly very good as it still was in the old days and builders had possibly better materials than are found in some properties today. These cottages have one important requirement that is lacking in most construction these days, they are quiet, and quiet now costs money; no one buys an estate to have to listen to neighbours talking outside but noise is a part of low income living; there is noise from neighbours, trucks and cars, and people with loud voices playing loud music heard through walls that are paper thin. When we moved here some of the people living in these cottages had lived here since the 1950s and 1960s; they loved their homes.  Now, the area is being gentrified, you see Mercedes and BMWs parked outside these formerly humble houses that are renovated and have lost all of the original floor plan. They are no longer cosy, They aren't even nice.

These Cape Cod cottages are also in demand because there aren't many detached houses in this Montreal neighbourhood, we live in this least stylish area of a stylish neighbourhood. There are mostly four-plexes, duplexes, and semi-detached homes in the stylish areas and most of these homes are very nice, they have hard wood floors and hard wood trim, French doors opening into the living or dining rooms, a working fire place, and they have large bed rooms. I grew up in one of these four-plexes not far from where I now live and it was very pleasant to live there; however, I doubt that a single-woman, or a single parent, raising a family on one income could afford to live there today, which is what my mother did, she kept us living in a nice place after my father died in 1956. Now, here is the ironic thing; I remember my mother saying, many years ago, that she should have moved to a less expensive neighbourhood, perhaps to a little house in Verdun by which she was referring to a Cape Cod cottage in that working class city adjoining Montreal. It was fate that I should end up living in Casa Bella.

Casa Bella, 27 May 2021