photography: Carmel Preservation Foundation
Hugh Comstock was neither architect nor home builder when he began constructing his storybook cottages, just imaginative and determined. |
Once upon a time in a land at the edge of the world, where tall pine trees swayed with ocean breezes and a white sand beach smiled broadly at a big blue ocean, there lived a woman who made and sold dolls. She made so many of her Otsy Totsy rag dolls that she asked her husband to build a house for them. With no training in dollhouse building (or any building, for that matter) the husband dreamed up and built a teeny-tiny house with a sloping roof of hand-cut shingles and a stone chimney that wasn't quite straight. He named the house "Hansel" and his fairy tale began . . . .
This story is true and it started in 1924 when young Hugh Comstock took a trip down the California coast to the artistic enclave of Carmel. The sublime beauty of the area had been snatching up weekend visitors and making them full-time residents for decades. Especially Carmel. Though Jack London, among other authors, had camped out under its pines and built fires on its beach, the town didn't come into its own as a bonafide artist colony until the 1906 San Francisco earthquake drove some of the Bay Area's creative class to Carmel's laid-back town of fewer than 500 people.
photography: Carmel Preservation Foundation
Comstock first built the Hansel and Gretel cottages (Hansel pictured here) in 1924 to house Mayotta's doll collection. Their tiny, storybook style quickly caught on and lead to a building burst in the adjoining neighborhood. |
photography: Roger Davies
The Hansel cottage today. |
By the time Comstock arrived for his visit, Carmel held two things that attracted him: a conservation ethic (Ordinance No. 7 stated that no tree, shrub, or bush be cut or removed on public property) and a dollmaker named Mayotta Brown. The two married in the first year, and soon they were mixing pine needles with plaster to cover the walls of the first Comstock cottage, Hansel. Comstock was not an architect and had never built a house. He had been fascinated as a boy by the drawings of British children's book illustrator Sir Arthur Rackham. He had imagination, and he had $100 (the building cost according to town ledger).Despite Comstock's inexperience and lack of formal training (he rarely used a carpenter's level), the house did not collapse and the storybook appeal caught on. Soon the old facades of storefronts came down and the town's small Craftsman and Victorian architecture gave way to the celebration of whimsy and fantasy that defines Carmel to this day.
photography: Roger Davies
Ober's Cottage |
photography: Roger Davies
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