Anticipation — ARTIFEX COTTAGES

The anticipation around Artifex is thicker than ketchup these days, as we lay the groundwork - literally - for our first modular cottage to arrive. We’ve built homes before (over a thousand homes, collectively). We’ve used modular cottages, too. (More on that in a moment.) But this new cottage will be a first for us: the first Artifex-designed cottage to roll straight from the factory to its permanent location. Artifex Cottage #1 is coming to Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

Ocean Springs is the site of Cottage Square, an award-winning neighborhood that Bruce Tolar first developed between 2006 and 2010. Cottage Square’s original homes included early Katrina Cottages designed by Marianne Cusato, Bruce Tolar, and Steve Mouzon, as well as eight Mississippi Cottages from an order of 3,000 that the state used as temporary housing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Those Mississippi Cottages were the first wave of Cottage Square homes to be built off site as modular cottages. They were delivered to Cottage Square and set onto permanent foundations over the course of four days in 2009.

Three former Mississippi Cottages, now settled into their new home at Cottage Square.

When the hurricane recovery period ended, Mississippi sold its remaining inventory of cottages to buyers as far away as Denver, Colorado. Fast forward to 2019, when Artifex purchased eleven of the deaccessioned cottages from an owner who had not yet given them a permanent home. We trucked the cottages to Ocean Springs, and they are now part of Cottage Square’s “second wave” of factory-built homes.

Today, that second wave is nearing completion, and we’re preparing the site on which Artifex Cottage #1 will be placed. We’ve been working toward this moment for years. Watch this page or subscribe to our mailing list to take the journey with us.

Read more about the Katrina Cottage movement and the origins of Cottage Square in this case study by Bruce Tolar and Ben Brown, written for The Project for Lean Urbanism.