A Customized Cottage With Deep Ties to the Land
Farmdale is the main residence of designer, author and lifestyle expert James Farmer, whose latest book, Arriving Home, is now on pre-sale and shipping September 2020. Farmer built the four-bedroom, four-bath home on family land in Perry, Georgia, and has lived there since 2015. "I always knew I wanted to build there," Farmer says. He hired his friend Robert Norris as the architect. For inspiration and in keeping with his family roots, Farmer showed Norris a painting of where his grandfather grew up — an old general store and post office combo in Alabama, made from cedar and complete with a clipped hip gable and side steps. "Since I live in the middle of Georgia woodlands," he says, "I felt the elegance of a simple, Southern vernacular was apropos."