Inside the Classic Cottage: A 1,000 sq ft DADU, Room by Room
By Eric Dexter, Owner & Builder ·
Most of what you can find online about backyard cottages is a rendering. This is a built one — our signature Classic Cottage DADU, photographed at handover — and a walk through what was built and why it was built that way. Everything below is the actual unit; nothing is a mock-up.
The brief
A two-story detached unit of about 1,000 square feet — right around the size most Washington jurisdictions allow for a DADU — with two bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms. Designed with CB Anderson Architects as a modern farmhouse: covered front porch, living on the main floor, bedrooms up. The brief was a cottage that reads as a real house from the street rather than an outbuilding, on a footprint small enough to leave a backyard.
Why two stories
A thousand square feet on one level eats a yard. Stacking it halves the footprint, which is usually what makes a cottage fit inside the lot coverage and setback envelope at all — and it is why the Classic Cottage is the plan we build most often. The tradeoff is stairs, which is also why we design a single-level version for owners planning to age in place. How the envelope is decided is in how big a DADU can be.
From the street
The exterior photographs cover the front elevation at twilight and at handover, the covered entry porch at dusk, the two-story elevation with the entry overhang, and a corner where the two-tone Hardie siding meets the overhang. The roof line is a dark metal shed roof set against the cedars. The porch and the black front door do most of the work of making it read as a home — a detached unit with a real front door and somewhere to stand out of the rain is received very differently by neighbours, and by tenants, than a box with a door in it.
Inside: one open main floor
The interior set shows the open living area with the staircase, the living room around the fireplace, living and dining together by the fireplace, the living area under its feature windows, and the kitchen with its tile backsplash and island. In a thousand square feet, the decision that matters most is not to divide the main floor. One room that is living, dining and kitchen at once feels like far more space than three rooms that are each too small, and it puts the windows where people actually sit.
The fireplace is the anchor the plan is organised around; the island is the second one. Everything else — the stair, the entry, the half bath — sits at the edges so the middle stays open.
Materials that last in this climate
Fibre-cement siding and a standing-seam metal roof are the two exterior choices we repeat on nearly every cottage, because they are the two that shrug off a Puget Sound winter with the least maintenance. The two-tone siding is doing aesthetic work too — it breaks the massing of a two-story unit so it does not loom over the main house.
What a cottage like this costs
We do not publish a price for a specific client's project, and we do not invent one here. The honest all-in ranges for a build of this type — design, permitting, site work and construction — are on realistic costs, and the cost calculator will bracket a 1,000 sq ft two-bedroom on your own lot. The site conditions move the number more than the finishes do.
See it, then see the others
The full photo set is on our projects page, alongside the Lake City home, the 5th Avenue NE DADU and the North Seattle DADU — every photo a build we delivered. The Classic Cottage plan itself is on floor plans. If you want to know whether it fits your yard, send us your address.
