One of the characteristic and frequent adjuncts to Bermuda dwellings are the butteries. These are sometimes joined to the main building, but are often detached elements, and are, I believe, in the form that they appear on the islands, peculiar to Bermuda though Sicily is said to have somewhat similar out buildings. They are small two-story buildings with thick walls and small openings, with high pyramidal roofs, built by a series of inwardly encorbled courses of heavy masonry and present a decidedly monumental appearance. They were built before the days of ice, as a place to keep perishable food cool. Elevated and pierced with small shuttered openings to catch the breezes, they had thick walls and roofs as defense against the sun's rays.
The chimneys area prominent feature, particularly in the smaller houses. Open fireplaces with hearths waist high were used for cooking, and are still in use for this purpose in some places, although oil stoves are generally replacing them.
The kitchen fireplace was accompanied by a built-in stone oven with its own flue, sometimes beside the kitchen fireplace, with independent chimney, and sometimes opening into it. The sides of these fireplaces sloped gently to a flue, so large and deep, that it carried off heat as well as the acrid smoke of burning cedar. Where the slave quarters were in the basement or cellar, there was a separate cooking fireplace for their use, so that even many of the small houses had two chimneys. In the larger houses of the more well-to-do, where slaves were owned in greater numbers, they were lodged in a separate building, and the owner's house usually had fireplaces to warm and dry the house during the colder weeks of winter. These fireplaces were of large size, with a raised hearth and no outer hearth. With the soft stone, the walls of the chimneys were necessarily thick, which gives them a prominence at first somewhat surprising for a sub-tropical climate. Chimneys projecting from the roof seemingly became a necessity to satisfy appearances, even when no real chimney existed. In many of the smallest houses, little false chimneys placed at the point of the hip are used as ornament to the roof.
Buttresses occur not infrequently and add to the character of the houses as well as having the structural function of overcoming the outward thrust of the rafters, that might otherwise be too great for the stability of the walls. These buttresses are sometimes reduced to salient pilasters on the thinner walls of the second story or pilasters of decided projection the full height of the house.