What Is Cottagecore? A Simple Guide

Cottagecore is a social media hashtag and internet-based lifestyle trend inspired by a quaint vision of country life.

Based on an idealized back-to-nature concept of simpler times, its romanticized aesthetics center on natural materials, wholesome pastimes, handmade crafts, homemade baked goods, gardening, and other hallmarks of bucolic domesticity. 

Unlike past historical aesthetic movements that arose as a backlash to industrialization and technology, cottagecore provides its escapism via an internet portal where urban and suburban influencers and followers can tap into the collective fantasy of running away to a cabin in the woods or a cottage in a meadow—all without ever leaving home or facing the realities and challenges of rural life.

What is Cottagecore?

Cottagecore is an aesthetic and design style that encourages adopting a simpler and more bucolic lifestyle.

Its design characteristics include vintage and handcrafted items such as clothing, candles, furniture, and needlework.

Cottagecore also encourages learning homesteading skills that promote self-sufficiency, including vegetable gardening, baking from scratch, and raising backyard chickens.

A Short History of Cottagecore

Cottagecore became a hashtag around 2018 and quickly boomed as an internet phenomenon. Cottagecore influencers glamorize country life, creating dreamy pastoral imagery that allows their followers to teleport themselves into an escapist oasis built to counteract the pressures of modern life.

It’s the stuff of flowy prairie dresses and sourdough starters, of hand-dried wildflower arrangements and hand-stitched quilts strewn on antique beds, of handmade pies cooling in open windows with the sun shining in.

In an era where just about everybody wishes they had a bucolic getaway, cottagecore brings the stylized movie set dream of a fairytale cottage in some magical woods or an enchanted English countryside meadow to you, wherever you are.

But what The New York Times called a “budding aesthetic movement” is in fact nothing new.

It’s just the latest iteration of an age-old nostalgia for an agricultural life that humans routinely long for when human invention or social change accelerates the pace of modern life. The Arts and Crafts movement of the 19th and 20th centuries was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution and Victorian-era opulence.

The countercultural movement of the 1960s and its back-to-nature, DIY ethos that carried into the 1970s was in part a rejection of capitalism. 

What makes cottagecore distinct is that it was born on the internet and largely exists there, far away from the realities of country life.

Critics argue that cottagecore is skewed towards a more patriarchal era and it is common to find a hashtag arguing for social justice on a cottagecore post.

The truth is that cottagecore's nostalgic inclinations belong to everyone regardless of lifestyle, gender, or orientation. Its adjacent subcultures include naturecore, meadowcore, frogcore, grandmacore, faeriecore, farmcore, and goblincore.

Cottagecore Lifestyle and Design

Cottagecore decor embraces simplicity and nostalgia. It favors whimsy, as well. But it also revolves around a sustainable, frugal lifestyle that focuses on intentionally using items with purpose.

Keeping those goals in mind, cottagecore interiors are typically filled with functional baskets and wood boxes, lots of greenery from plants to botanical prints, layered rugs for warmth and comfort, playful floral wallpapers, and rustic items brought indoors from the countryside.

Furniture can include cottage-style hutches, vintage desks, and antique bureaus. Cottagecore exteriors often include a small, informal cottage garden and a space for vegetable gardening.

Key Characteristics of Cottagecore

• A wistful, romantic take on rustic simplicity
• A back-to-basics, slow-life spirit as seen through a rose-colored lens
• Focus on tactile and sensual pleasures 
• Coziness and domesticity
• Focus on sustainability 
• Prioritizing handcrafted and vintage items that have a history and tell a story
• Embracing nature by bringing the outdoors inside, with flowers, plants, and natural elements
• Celebration of skills and crafts such as knitting, sewing, embroidery, crochet, baking, gardening, candle-making
• Focus on self-sufficiency, such as foraging for mushrooms in the woods, raising your own chickens, cultivating your own vegetable garden

Cottagecore Decorating Tips 

• Embrace rustic furniture and accessories.
• Use natural materials like wood and stone and textiles like linen and wool.
• Rediscover granny chic with items like vintage tea cups, lace doilies, and embroidery.
• Use of earthy, warm, neutral tones in everything from textiles to wall colors.
• Source second-hand furniture and decor from yard sales to reduce waste.
• Showcase family heirlooms.
• Incorporate natural elements such as fresh or dried flowers, plants, or nature-inspired decor.
• Collect and display coffee table books about cabins and classic literature by Beatrix Potter, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, or vintage copies of "The Secret Garden."
• Install a chicken coop in the backyard.
• Make regular use of your fireplace or, if you don't have one, create an inviting focal point (or faux fireplace) with a floating shelf mantel full of candles and pine cones in winter or dried flowers in summer.
• Add cozy, homey touches like vintage quilts, crocheted plant hangers, or handmade beeswax candles, all the better if you have made them yourself.
• Hide technology to create a timeless feel.