The vintage cottage now on sale in Royal Muskoka Island is anything but ordinary.  It’s definitely one of the rarest houses you would see near a body of water, since regulations nowadays would prevent any new building from being erected so close to the water.  The sunroom of this cottage is only 31 feet away from the water.  The cottage itself is surrounded by many trees and other plants, making it a haven for nature lovers.

Inside the cottage is a simple and clean design with uncluttered lines.  There are four bedrooms located on the four corners of the cottage giving each bedroom a view in two directions.  It is 510 feet of shoreline on Royal Muskoka Island in Lake Rosseau. The 2,272-square-foot cottage is on the market for the first time since it was built in 1959.

There’s a lot of history behind the construction of this house, Craig Stephens said.  His parents, John and Margaret bought this lot on Royal Muskoka Island, which was only one of the many lots sold from what was left of Royal Muskoka Hotel that burned down back in 1901.  When all the others started building their houses on the lots they bought, John and Margaret struggled to find a plan that they liked.

Margaret Stephens picked up a copy of Better Homes and Gardens in 1958 and decided that the house featured on the magazine’s cover would make an ideal Muskoka cottage and found a builder to copy it in year 1959.

The house that so impressed Ms. Stephens was the home of renowned U.S. architect John Black Lee, who built the house for his own family home in New Canaan, Conn.  In Better Homes and Gardens , writer Neil Kuehnl described the virtues of the house: “Every once in a while, we discover a house that offers a startling amount of useful space – far more than its size or cost suggests. Usually it has a simple plan and clean, uncluttered lines. Such a house recalls a basic, centuries-old building fact: that simplicity and well-organized space nearly always go hand in hand.”

Mr. Kuehul went on to say: “This house is just a rectangle – with four corner bedrooms, two baths, and a large central area designed for family living. That’s all … no halls, no stairways, no extra ups, downs, or sideways about it.”

The article further explains that to create openness in the main living area, they followed a combination of post-and-beam construction, while in the bedrooms, conventional construction was applied.  The roof is raised above clerestory windows.

Based on that description, you’ll pretty much have an idea of how the Stephens’  cottage look like.

The open living space is ideal for hosting parties and gatherings while the porch enclosed with sliding glass doors creates a sunroom.  The kitchen was called “the world’s largest galley kitchen,” by Mr. Paul Crammond of Chestnut Park Real Estate Ltd., the property’s agent.

Mr. Stephens says its openness allowed anyone preparing food to remain part of the social scene.  The family built an oversized boathouse, a detached garage and a boat port with sundeck above.  The point of land includes a sand beach area, deeper granite shore and gentle terrain.

On Royal Muskoka, the Stephens recently cut the price by $300,000 to $2.695-million, Mr. Crammond says, “indicating that the family would like to sell this year, not 2010”.