The Empty Nest: Chocolate Box Cottages....No silly, you don't eat them!

Hello friends...welcome back.

Do you know what a 'chocolate box cottage' is?

I had never heard of the term until I began to research photos for a post on English cottages. I kept seeing this term being used in descriptions of cute cottage homes.

Here is the definition according to David Burr, a British real estate company.

The term ‘chocolate box’ originates from late Victorian times. Today it is used to describe something which is ‘sentimentally appealing or pretty in a conventional way’.

Gaining popularity in the mid-20th Century, the phrase ‘chocolate box cottage’ derives from the picturesque scenes printed on boxes of Cadbury’s chocolates throughout the 1950s and 60s. During this period, the confectionery company included scenes from the ‘model village’ of Bourneville on their packaging.

Built in the late Victorian period by George Cadbury, Bourneville’s high-quality houses were constructed to house the workers at Cadbury’s nearby factory and other families from the back streets of Birmingham. Letting the homes for low rent, Cadbury’s socially responsible aim was to house people on lower incomes.

When these scenic images started appearing on Cadbury’s packaging, the term chocolate box cottage was coined.

The quaint cottages often had low ceilings inside whiches added to their coziness, at least one fireplace, a garden and often a thick thatched roof.