Ivory Cottage Large S2

Christmas village houses are the rare decoration that gets better the longer you collect them, and this large ivory cottage is a good anchor piece to build a scene around. Ivory keeps it quiet, which is useful when the rest of the village is bright.

Village displays work best when the buildings vary in scale, so a large cottage gives the smaller shops and houses something to sit against. Group it with a second, smaller building and the whole thing starts to feel like a street. Add bottle brush trees for landscape, a run of cotton batting for snow, and you have a scene that reads as a place rather than a shelf of objects. It is the kind of piece that earns a permanent spot in the box that comes out first.

What is a putz house? A putz house is a small decorative Christmas house displayed as part of a miniature village scene. The name comes from the Moravian custom of building a putz, a nativity landscape set up beneath the tree at Christmas.