- Topic: Encore: Cottage Life: Is It A Cottage, Chalet, Cabin Or Camp? Readers Quizzed On Their Fave Oasis
By Andrew Macdonald
Each year, we feature this article.
May and Victoria Day Weekend typically brings the start of cottage season for those folk among the readership who have seasonal abodes. Some readers even have year-round cottages.
Cottage Life: Is It A Cottage, Camp, Cabin Or Chalet?
Typically, Victoria Day weekend marks the annual ritual when many of our readers in Nova Scotia joyfully open up the seasonal pad. It could be located on the ocean, lake or deep in the woods.
Each year, at this time, I roll out our archived Notebook feature, where we have previously canvassed a few of our readers on what they call their special weekend and summer getaway.
Is it “the cottage,” “the camp,” “the cabin” or “the chalet”?
The majority of those canvassed tell The Macdonald Notebook their special oasis is called simply “the cottage”.
No one we spoke to in these parts uses the term chalet. That is more likely to be found in the ski hills of Quebec.
While really a chalet, the former Charlie Keating abode at the base of Ski Wentworth was always referred by the former cable baron as “the cottage”, says his son Gregg, who says the residence was sold after his father died.
The camp is the term used by Paul Allen, office administrator at the Nova Scotia Utility & Review Board, to describe his 90-year-old dad’s former pad deep in the woods in Cumberland County at Shulie, permanent population of about two people.
“‘Cottages,’ in my limited view, are found beside seashores and lakes, being primarily for leisure. ‘Camps’ are for the less genteel activities such as hunting and fishing,” says Allen.
Blue Rocks is a cottage enclave, near the Town of Lunenburg. The Notebook photo.
The Cottages of Queens County
Diana Dalton, a former deputy energy minister in Newfoundland, for years, owned a Queens County pad, which to her represented the “quintessential Canadian cottage”.
Relying on a “well decorated” outhouse, it is situated on Lake Ponhook, near Molega Lake and on the way to Keji.
“It is on a cove with only one other cottage and has a gorgeous view and a beach. It is not winterized and only has a wood stove,” she says.
“That keeps the snobs away so the people who do visit are adventurous like me and willing to lay back and relax.”
Dalton sold the cottage in recent years. While she was in residency, she had no TV, internet nor cell service, using a landline for emergencies.
She called her cottage ‘Mes Rochers’ in honour of lakefront rocks that act as a wharf.
This was the prize in the 2019 fall lottery for the Chester Skipper Hill oceanfront cottage.
“There is a kayak and no motorized ‘toys’ to disturb the loons, ducks and turtles which float by frequently.”
Her former cottage is not far from top commercial real-estate veteran Tim Margolian. He’s on Molega Lake, in what he calls a cottage.
While it’s winterized, the downtown Halifax condo dweller says the family doesn’t intend to live there year-round.
“The difference between lake people and (South Shore) ocean people is that the ocean is very pretty to look at, but you can’t go in it unless you are below the age of five. We are active people and we water ski on our lake, and we actually go in the water.”
Top drawer labour lawyer Ron Pink takes residence in the season at Summerville Beach, in Queens County.
The pad has been in his late wife’s family for generations. They, too, call it a cottage.
South Shore Mega Cottages
In Lunenburg County, the cottage is the term lovingly used, even for multimillion-dollar mansions.
Richard Malone, whose family once owned The Globe & Mail and who has a winter base in Fort Lauderdale, calls his Chester abode simply “the Nova Scotia home”.
It’s on posh Chester Peninsula where the late J.R. Shaw of Shaw Cable paid $6 million for his seasonal retreat, several years back.
Inside the Chester, Skipper Hill cottage won by a Loblaw exec, Kirk Robar in the QE II Cottage Lottery in 2019.
Tim Harris, a realtor who specializes in selling and listing seasonal mansions on the South Shore, says even the multi-million dollar abodes are called cottages.
“It is all relative to the owner,” he says.
“As you mentioned, you are at the cottage for the summer to write, so can a CEO of a major corporation be at a $3 million cottage in Hubbards to write?”
Clearwater Seafoods co-founder Colin MacDonald has a mansion on Back Harbour Chester.
“We call our Chester house, home. It is where we spend most of our year. We only retreat to the city in the winter months.
“I think most Chesterites look at their houses there as the preferred location to live — the peace, quiet, solitude, low traffic, animal life, birds (besides crows) singing in the morning. It all more than compensates for the long drive to work. But that impression is prejudiced by my own feelings,” says MacDonald.
At St. Margaret’s Bay, prolific condo and apartment developer Wadih Fares calls his seasonal mansion “the cottage”. His son Maurice used to keep a small powerboat there.
Ex-JW Lindsay Enterprises construction bigwig Kirby Putnam traded in a seasonal pad on Shortt’s Lake between Brookfield and Stewiacke last December for a home in Chester Basin.
Of his former cottage, which he sold to druggist Charles MacQuarrie, he once said: “It is a narrow slice of lake heaven with a history of championship waterskiing and is notorious for weekend revelry.”
“Shortts Cottage sold Xmas eve day 2019. We will miss it but we were ready for a new chapter”, says Putnam. On his new Chester Basin pad, he explains: “It was built in 1921 our two-story house on a bluff overlooking Stevens Cove and Shaw island, includes a barn, orchards, beach and a wharf. The previous owners called the place Halcyon for a reason. We are discovering why”.
It’s Always Sunny In Pictou County
At Kings Head Beach near New Glasgow, year-round neighbours include the Sobey family, former Tory premier Donnie Cameron, and Tom MacQuarrie, a partner at Stewart McKelvey .
This cottage at Skipper Hill in Chester offers oceanfront views.
In Antigonish County, Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board commissioner David Almon has a summer pad on the shores of St. George’s Bay at Mahoney’s Beach. His neighbours include the children of the late Liberal Senator Al Graham.
Almon, too, refers to it as the cottage. It was his grandfather’s pad.
Cape Breton Retreat
Recently departed Billy Joe MacLean, the long-running mayor of Port Hawkesbury, and his lovely wife, Glenda, have a special retreat in Dundee on the beautiful Bras D’Or Lake, a saltwater, land-locked sailing mecca in Cape Breton.
The waters of the Bras d’Or are swimmable from mid-June to the end of October.
“My cottage is my cottage,” says Billy Joe who does 10 or 20 rounds of golf at nearby 18-hole Dundee Golf & Country Club.
“It’s a great place to go and relax and enjoy the family,” he says.
P.E.I., The Rock & The West Coast
Over in Prince Edward Island, the term cottage is most often used, unless you’re Mike Duffy. Then the ‘cottage’ becomes the “principal residence”.
Donnie Clow, however, called his former Island pad “the cottage”. Clow, the Crombie REIT CEO, now has a cottage on Mahone Bay.
In Newfoundland, a seasonal abode is called “a cabin”. Diana Dalton adds: “They call them shacks if they are the lowest level.”
Clearwater Seafoods’ co-founders Colin MacDonald and John Risley have a fishing retreat in Labrador, and call it a “fishing camp”.
And, in British Columbia, downtown Vancouverite Chris Sims says: “Out on the West Coast, if you own property on the Sunshine Coast, they are called houses. If you are in the interior of B.C., in remote areas, they often refer to them as cabins.
Chester’s Skipper Hill is ground zero for the QE II Cottage Lotteries over recent years. The Notebook Photo.
“Summer cottages seem to be more the East Coast term,” says Sims.
Sims, a native of Sackville, N.B. ( his dad Walter Sims was a prof at Mount Allison), is gearing up to take residency in his summer cottage in Antigonish County. He’s the second generation to use the pad at Jimtown Beach.
As the weather warms in the Maritimes, it seems a universal greeting: “Are you in residence?” That’s code for: “Has the cottage been opened yet and is it now being occupied?”
Cottages at Blue Rocks, near Lunenburg. (The Notebook photo).
