Nestled behind rhododendron bushes, at the end of a gravel road in remote Huntington Point, N.S., sits a cluster of four whimsical huts covered in colourful stones resembling gumdrops. On one, the verandah roof is hoisted up by what appear to be tree trunks sprouting from the ground. One glimpse of the fairytale forms—which look like life-sized versions of something a child might fashion out of clay—could make you suspect you’re dreaming. Yet, blink, rub your eyes, open them again, and take a closer look. The cottage that looks like it is spun from sugar is actually made of solid concrete—delicate in appearance but potentially sturdy enough to survive a bomb blast.
For almost a century, these peculiar structures have stoked the curiosity of passersby. But, despite their singularity, mention the name of their builder, Charles Macdonald, to anyone outside of the Annapolis Valley, and you might be met with a quizzical stare. Unlike famed folk artist Maud Lewis, whose cozy cabin interior stands permanently at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, these concrete creations have yet to claim their status in the province’s annals of history and art. Teetering on the precipice between renown and obscurity, the Macdonald cottages, which were built in the 1930s, may be Nova Scotia’s best-kept secret.
“That he could just make this up in his head, and, years later, they’re still here just astounds me,” says Fred Macdonald, the great-nephew of Charles Macdonald and his wife, Mabel. The couple never had any children, and Fred now shares ownership of one of the four cottages, the Macdonald Cottage, with his brother, Ron.
Though fairytale-like at first glance, a stay at the Macdonald Cottage reveals its rustic nature. Waking up in the morning, streams of daylight peek through the small cracks in the concrete walls. The stairs are so shallow and steep, everyone descends them backwards as if climbing down a ladder. The bathroom can only be accessed through a door outside the main cottage, and the shower is a hose fastened above a wobbly concrete block in a woodshed. The septic system, says Fred, is “basically a crock in the ground,” and must be pumped out every few years. The effect is comparable to indoor camping.
And yet, there’s something magical that comes with staying in such austere conditions.
Everywhere in the cottage, the hand of the maker is visible. You can see where the concrete was applied to the walls using a trowel, as thickly as buttercream icing. Dusty woodland dioramas of concrete deer made by Charlie dot the interior. The ceiling bears the wrinkles of the paper bags used to stanch the flow of concrete while pouring the floor of the second storey. A vase in the sitting room is also fashioned from concrete, inlaid with smooth beach pebbles. Listen closely and you can hear the crashing waves of the Bay of Fundy, which make you feel like you’re on the edge of the world; technically, you kind of are.
By all accounts, Charles Macdonald was a bonafide eccentric, not to mention a study in contradictions: an individualist and pillar of the community, a generous man with a gruff exterior, and a socialist who owned an extremely successful business. Born in 1874 in Steam Mill, N.S., he left school at the age of 15 to work in a coffin factory, then a carriage factory. For fun, he would head to the shore to watch locally built sailing ships launch into the ocean. He then became a ship’s carpenter, travelling to London, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Seville, Lima, and beyond. In 1912, he returned to the Annapolis Valley and opened a concrete factory in Centreville, where he is said to have resided temporarily in a tent on the roof.
In photographs, Charles, known as Charlie by friends and family, is slightly gnomish in appearance, with a mischievous glint in his eye. According to family lore, he wed Mabel, 24 years his junior, on a cold January afternoon in 1916. After, they walked home four kilometres in the snow, where Charlie presented Mabel with a rolling pin as a wedding gift.
When the demand for concrete swelled during the First World War, Charlie moved his business to a larger facility ten kilometres south, in Kentville, N.S. But he liked the area, so he began buying property there, including a rugged, roughly 18-acre patch of land on the shore of the Bay of Fundy for camping. After marrying Mabel, he transformed the old Centreville factory into a home by adding a second storey and fashioning furniture out of concrete—including the bathtub. The home marked the beginning of Charlie’s lifelong fascination with the building material, which certainly hadn’t seen much play in rural Nova Scotia, where wood was more commonly used. Charlie was primarily drawn to the substance because of its durability and inflammability.
At the onset of the Great Depression, Charlie, then in his 50s and an avowed socialist who ran his business as a co-op, didn’t lay off his workers: he’d saved money for a rainy day when business was booming during the First World War. Whenever business was slow, he’d bring the workers out to his land at Huntington Point near the Bay of Fundy to have them experiment with building concrete structures. Over the course of four years, they created the five cottages that would become Charlie’s masterpieces.
Pauline Harris who inherited the Green Cottage from her parents, has spent summers on Huntington Point since she was a child. Pauline remembers how Charlie would begin a build by pacing out its perimeter. From there, he and his crew would layer concrete from the ground up, reinforcing it with salvaged driftwood and scraps of metal, such as door hinges and unused concrete pipes repurposed from the factory.
“His building method was, you put a little on, you scrape a little off, and pretty soon you’ve got something,” says Fred. “The thing with concrete, though, is if you change your mind, it could be problematic.” But Charlie never seemed to change his mind. With no drawings or plans to go on, everything was done organically. Each new section of the build informed the next; as if the cottage itself was dictating how it would like to be structured.
Charlie’s ad hoc approach made him a pioneer of the “no-plan building method,” a term coined by Christopher Alexander in the 1977 architecture and urban design book, A Pattern Language. Alexander writes, “Buildings should be uniquely adapted to individual needs and sites; and that the plans of buildings should be loose and fluid, in order to accommodate these subtleties.” This core text of radical architecture was published more than thirty years after Charlie’s last cottage was built.
Charlie’s first cottage, the Log Cabin, incorporated driftwood from the beach and felled timber from the wooded property, encased in concrete. The crew used that cottage as a residence while they built the other four. The second was nicknamed the “Teapot Cottage” or the “Round Cottage;” a completely round structure with a chimney on the side resembling the spout of a teapot. Pauline remembers it as the “cutest” of all the Macdonald cottages. Charlie used to welcome wartime couples for a stay who couldn’t afford a more expensive honeymoon, she says. Next was the Green Cottage, then the Blue Cottage, and finally, the Macdonald Cottage, all named after their various attributes (the Blue Cottage, for its blue roof, for example). He would spend his summers there for the rest of his 93 years. As far as Pauline knows, the other cottages were eventually sold via rent-to-own agreements to his close friends.
Not all the original cottages remain. The unassuming wooden cottage on a path called “Teapot Lane” next to two originals has a relatively unhappy origin. In the early 1980s, what many considered Charlie’s boldest and most ambitious work, the Teapot Cottage, was bulldozed to make room for a newer, modern cottage. It had been inherited by the original owner’s grandchild, who had no use for the primitive palace, with its outdated facilities and exaggerated whimsy. “I can understand it to a point. They had a young family, and it was all one room inside. It wasn’t practical for them,” says Fred. Still, he was disappointed by the disrespect for his great-uncle’s art. “It was part of the collection.”
Yet the individual character of the cottages makes them tricky to maintain. Their lumpy, haphazard construction and strange angles often prove challenging to repair people, whose training dictates accuracy and precision. When the Blue Cottage required some new plastering on a crumbling wall, Fred instructed the workers to “not do such a good job” so the repair would match the cottage’s original haphazard look. He still laments the finished product. “It’s the only straight wall in the place,” he says.
Other necessary upgrades have been implemented in the cottages over the years. Each owner has added electricity and some have replaced the fireplaces with woodstoves. In the Macdonald Cottage, the kitchen, once fitted with open shelving covered by a pull-across curtain and an oil range stove, now has cheerful yellow cabinets and an electric stove. “In the summer, it would be thirty degrees out, they’d have the oil range on, and it would be forty degrees inside,” says Fred. “We use the carport as a sitting area now. With a couple chairs and a table, it’s a beautiful place to enjoy the spring or summer sun,” he says. The cottage’s water supply, however, is still gravity-fed from a spring in the nearby forest, located 150 metres uphill.
And while the concrete cottages look solid enough to survive just about anything, they are surprisingly fragile. Concrete expands and contracts according to temperature, creating small fractures and leaks. Every few years, Fred paints the roof with an elastomeric coating, a waterproof membrane that keeps the leaks at bay. (Up until her 80s, Mabel would climb up ladders with a bucket of tar to patch up the cottage’s leaky roof.) Still, the ravages of age continue to pile up. When Fred spends time at the cottage, he mostly finds himself doing maintenance tasks, such as painting rocks or landscaping.
But the cottages, despite the work it requires to maintain them, offer something worth returning for every year. For Pauline, it’s undeniable solitude. “I just like the quietness,” she says. “My sister and I had so much freedom when we were young because there was no one around. We had the whole beach to ourselves. There was a weir where the fishermen tended in low tide, and in daylight, we always went down to the weir, and we used to bag fish to eat.” As the cottage nearest to the shore, Pauline’s rustic escape is also the most susceptible to the elements. “If there’s a high tide and strong wind, you can’t even look outside, the salt from the water just blinds you.” She remembers a time when she could spot whales from the living room window, and the beach was covered in so much driftwood you had to climb over piles of it to get to the water.
However, the future of Pauline’s cottage is in limbo. She wants to pass on ownership to her son and daughter, but she’s unsure if her daughter, who lives an hour away, would be able to make time to maintain it.
Fred is in a similar boat. “I’m approaching my best-before date, and I’m trying to figure out what to do.” Fred aims to keep the cottage in the family, but he’s the only one living nearby, and maintenance is just one of the concerns he has about keeping it. In 2023, the property taxes went up, and Fred is hoping rental income will help cover the increase. He’s pondered carrying on Charlie’s socialist tradition by creating a co-op that family members can join, or perhaps a social enterprise that employs a caretaker, reinvesting any profits back into the house.
No one can explain exactly why Charles Macdonald built these cottages the way he did. But it’s clear that Charlie’s inherent drive for artistic expression helped keep him going his entire life. Aside from being an innovative builder, Charlie was also an avid painter and sculptor. One of his smooth, impressionistic landscape paintings hangs above the woodstove in the Macdonald Cottage, and several of his life-sized deer sculptures adorn the lawn of the concrete house. “He never stopped moving, and he always had something to do,” says Fred.
Though Charlie’s artistic creations never achieved widespread acclaim, his memory lives on through his family members and the dedicated members of the Charles Macdonald House of Centreville Society, a non-profit dedicated to preserving his legacy, which was founded in 1997. Thanks to the society, the Charles Macdonald Concrete House and the Blue Cottage have been designated heritage properties.
The future of the remaining cottages is still uncertain. Whether they’re passed to a new generation or they’re taken into the care of the society, the concrete cottages will serve as both a portal to another era and a monument to the remarkable man who built them. As long as they stand, they will continue to be celebrated for their abundant charm and the wrinkle of eccentricity they add to the area and the province at large. “They are not houses, they are sculptures,” says board member Terry Drahos. “They are works of art.”
Isabel Slone is a writer based in Toronto. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Toronto Life. This is her first story for Cottage Life.
This story originally appeared in our June/July ’25 issue.