The Fairy-Tale Cottages of Hugh Comstock
Near Carmel, California
Wander the lanes of Carmel and you will feel you have stepped into the pages of a storybook, past crooked little cottages with steep flared roofs and stone chimneys that seem drawn by an illustrator. You have one man and a love story to thank. Hugh Comstock came to Carmel in nineteen twenty four to visit his sister, and stayed after meeting a local artist named Mayotta Browne, who made a wildly popular line of felt rag dolls she called the Otsy Totsies.
They married soon after. Mayotta needed somewhere to display her dolls, so Hugh, who had never built anything, put up a tiny fairy house in the woods. He named it Hansel.
Tiny, with a whimsical door and a chimney of stacked stones, it was inspired, the story goes, by the fairy tale drawings of the illustrator Arthur Rackham. Soon he built its twin, Gretel, next door. Then came the little cottage now known as the Tuck Box, perhaps the most photographed building in town, today an English tearoom serving scones.
Dozens of Comstock's storybook cottages still stand across Carmel, and they gave the whole village its enchanted, hand made face.
