The Art of Cottagecore

Cosy, romantic, bucolic – cottagecore is the perennially popular design aesthetic that only continues to blossom and bloom. But where did the trend come from, why is it here, and how can you incorporate it into you home?

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What is 'cottagecore'?

Cottagecore is a design aesthetic that is full of nostalgia for a way of life in the countryside. It’s pastoral and rose-tinted; a kind of elusive rural idyll. It’s an attempt to reconnect with nature, to conjure feelings of cosiness and comfort, through texture, layering, history, colour and pattern.

How did it come to be, and why is it so popular?

The suffix “(-)core” comes from a 2020s way to describe an aesthetic that gathers around one idea, or thing – which comes from the Latin word “cor,” meaning heart. Meaning: a love of all things cottage-esque.

And “cottage” is a Medieval word meaning a small, humble holding with a little garden, held by a person known as ‘cottager’ who could keep the house as long as they provided some form of service to the Lord of the Manor. Records from the Domesday Book (1086) list thousands of “cottages” across Kent, Yorkshire, and Devon in England.

Cottages emerged as a cultural idea of something wonderfully nostalgic, humble but charming during the Georgian and Regency period. “I am excessively fond of a cottage,” Jane Austen writes in Sense and Sensibility (1811) “there is always so much comfort, so much elegance about them. And I protest, if I had any money to spare, I should buy a little land and build one myself, within a short distance of London, where I might drive myself down at any time, and collect a few friends about me and be happy. I advise everybody who is going to build, to build a cottage.”

As we move into the Victorian era, we can see the adoration of all things cottagey shift into a greater counteracting feeling against the mass industrialisation taking place in English cities. This is evident in the way poets like John Clare, and William Wordsworth described cottages as part of a rural beauty, in the rhythm of nature and its seasons.

Fast forward to 2025, cottagecore is an aesthetic that feels like a counterpoint to the anxieties of climate change and screen-based sedentary lifestyles that remove us from noticing the seasons. Though the Victorians worried about their disconnection with nature – ours is only at a greater scale – a study published in the journal Earth found that the use of nature-related words has declined more than 60 percent between 1800 and 2019. And, in its 2007 edition, the Oxford Junior Dictionary – which is widely used in UK classrooms - removed dozens of entries related to the natural world, including “acorn”, “bluebell”, and “magpie” to make room among its 10,000 entries for modern inventions like “blog”, “chatroom”, and “MP3 player.”

This anxiety of disconnection brings once again this counteracting force: the love of cottages! The art of cottagecore. But how can we bring it into our homes today? Here are some ideas for incorporating the aesthetic into your home.

Tips for incorporating ‘cottagecore’ into your home

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Choose decoration that feels emotive, nostalgic, and comforting to you

A cottage feel, out of all aesthetics, is in no rush. It’s like a delayed form of gratification, an aesthetic that feels deeply analogue. It’s a vision worked best when layered over time with history, stories narratives, textures and memories – that strange trinket you got from an antique shop, a wallpaper that reminds you of staying over at your granny’s house when you were little.

Fabrics and wallpapers like Delphinium & Lilac, Trelliage, and Lakeland Paradis can add a sense of the cottagecore into your home. Take the Delphinium & Lilac – it’s an early 1900s hand- painted design, one taken from our archives at Sanderson, which is printed in England to the highest quality on a thick paper. The delphinium flower, too, is the quintessential bloom of the English cottage garden that really took hold as an idea of bucolic bliss in 19th-century Victorian England.

Fairdown – an archival trellis design with a woodblock-style floral motif – and more abstract patterned wallpapers like Rye and Truffle are also other designs to note.

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Pay attention to your local landscape

You don’t need to live in the countryside, or have a garden, to join in on the cottagecore aesthetic. All that’s required is to take in the landscape around you. It may not be fields or meadows (it could be?), but it might be just walking around your local park. Note the trees, birds, flowers, plants, and even the weeds between the pavement slabs – what colours jump out to you? How do colours come together? Do these colours change over the seasons? Are there trees around you, if so, what type? How do they grow? In groves or forests? Which flowers are native to your area, and is there a way you could incorporate them into your surroundings – on your wallpaper, perhaps?

Maybe if you notice in your local park there are lime trees, you could bring in Silver Lime wallpaper to carry it through into your home. Perhaps you started growing roses in the garden, you could have a room with Rose and Peony (a perennially popular 1914 archive design) to create this continuous feeling between the interior and exterior. Or maybe you’ve just started noticing the birds through the window (or through identifying their songs and calls on the Merlin app). The Woodland Chorus, with its British birds of green woodpecker, wren, robin, thrush and blue tits, hand-painted from 19th-century artwork, can bring these small observations of nature even closer into your day-to-day life.

This is exactly how interior designers Mary Graham and Nicole Salvesen (who make up Salvesen Graham) came up with the colours for their Sanderson trimmings range, naming them after the colours in nature they spotted in their local towns and villages in Northern Yorkshire – including Kirklington, Tanfield, and Thornborough.

All in all, embracing cottagecore is about being generous with your attention toward nature, deepening your perception of your local wildlife and landscape, and finding out what it means specifically to you. This gradual enrichening of perception will then inform the way you make aesthetic decisions within your home, where designs you’ve selected only become more beautiful over the years to come.