Residential dwellings can be built in a large variety of configurations. A basic division is between free-standing or detached dwellings and various types of attached dwellings. Detached dwellings vary greatly in scale and amount of accommodation provided. Similarly, attached or multi-unit housing is also varied in scale and levels of appointment. Although there appear to be many different types, many of the variations listed below are purely matters of style rather than spatial arrangement, or even, scale. Some of the terms listed are only used in some parts of the English speaking world.
Detached dwellings / single-unit housing
Example of an early Victorian "Gingerbread House" in the USA, built in 1855
*
Unit A type of
medium-density housing found in Australia and New Zealand
Movable dwellings
Attached dwellings / multi-unit housing
- Apartment: a relatively self-contained housing unit in a building which is often rented out to a family or one or more people for their exclusive use. Sometimes called a flat. Some locales have legal definitions of what constitutes an apartment. In some places \'apartment\' denotes a building that was built of such units, while \'flat\' denotes a unit in a building built originally as a single-family house and later subdivided.-
- Apartment building: a multi-unit dwelling made up of several (generally four or more) apartments.
- Apartment tower, block of flats or tower block: a high-rise apartment building
- Aul: a type of fortified village found throughout the Caucasus mountains, especially in Dagestan.
- Bachelor Suite: an apartment with a single room that serves the dual purpose of living/sitting room and bedroom. The unit is designed for a single occupant, though it could handle a couple who share the same sleeping quarters.
- Barracks, a type of military housing
- Brownstone: see rowhouse
- Bedsit: A UK expression (short for bed-sitting room) for a single-roomed dwelling which usually contains very sparse furniture and is very compact in design. Literally a bed and a place to sit.
- Choultry: a South-Indian Hindu-Caravanserai.
- Condominium: a form of ownership of an individual apartment and a percentage of common areas
- Co-op (or Housing cooperative), a form of ownership in which a non-profit corporation owns the entire apartment building or development and residents own shares in the corporation that correspond to their apartment and a percentage of common areas
- Duplex: Two separate residences, usually side-by-side, but sometimes on two different floors. The former often looks like two houses put together, sharing a wall (see semi-detached); the latter usually appears as a townhouse, but with two different entrances. The terms \'triplex\' and \'four-plex\' refer to similar structures with three or four units.
- Flat: an apartment, especially one taking up an entire floor of a house with several flats.
- 2-Flat, 3-Flat, and 4-Flat houses: Houses or buildings with 2, 3, or 4 flats, respectively, especially when each of the flats takes up one entire floor of the house. There is a common stairway in the front and often in the back providing access to all the flats. 2-Flats and sometimes 3-flats are common in certain older neighborhoods.
- Railroad flat: a type of apartment that is in a building built on a very narrow lot (usually about as wide as a railroad car, or Pullman car sections thereof), thus there is no room for a hallway. Rooms are built end-to-end, one must pass through all the rooms to get from one end to the other of the apartment.: see Railroad_apartment
- Garden Apartment: a building style usually characterized by two story, semi-detached buildings, each floor being a separate apartment.
- Garden flat: a flat which is at garden (ground) level in a multilevel house or apartment building, especially in the case of Georgian and Victorian terraced housing which has been sub-divided into separate dwellings.
- Ksar: a village consisting of generally attached houses, widespread among the oasis populations of the Maghreb (northern Africa.)
- Housing project: A North American term for government-owned housing for low-income tenants (aka public housing or social housing)
- Maisonette: an apartment / flat on two levels with internal stairs, or which has its own entrance at street level.
- Penthouse: The top floor of multi-story building
- Plattenbau (East German) / Panelák (Czech, Slovak) - a communist-era tower block that is made of slabs of concrete put together.
- Tenement a multi-unit dwelling made up of several (generally four or more) apartments (i.e. an apartment building). In the United States the connotation implies a run-down or poorly-cared-for building.
- Loft or warehouse conversion
- Garage-apartment: An apartment over a garage; if the garage is attached, the apartment will have a separate entrance from the main house.
- Garalow: a portmateau word garage+bungalow; similar to a garage-apartment, but with the apartment and garage at the same level.
- Mother-in-law apartment: Small apartment either at the back or on an upper level of the main house, usually with a separate entrance (also known as a "granny flat" in the UK, Australia and New Zealand). If it is a separate structure from the main house, it is called a \'granny cottage\' or a \'doddy house.\'
- four-plus-one: an apartment building that has four floors of apartments on top of parking. It was particularly popular in Chicago during the 1960s and 1970s, especially on the city\'s north side.
- Rooming house: a type of Single Room Occupancy building where most washing, kitchen and laundry facilities are shared. In Australia, any accommodation with 4 or more bedrooms can be regarded as a rooming house if each bedroom is subject to individual tenancy agreements.
- Rowhouse: (USA); also called "terraced home (USA); also called "townhouse"; ": 3 or more houses in a row sharing a "party" wall with its adjacent neighbour. In New York and Boston, "Brownstones" are rowhouses. Rowhouses are typically multiple stories. The term townhouse is currently coming into wider use in the UK, but terraced house (not "terraced home") is more common.
- Semi-detached: two houses joined together; compare duplex.
- Shophouse: the name given in Southeast Asia to a terraced two to five storey urban building featuring a shop or other public activity on the street level, with residential accommodation on upper floors.
- Six-pack: In New England (USA), this refers to a stick-built block of 6 apartments comprising 2 duplexes side by side. In Australia, it refers to a style of apartments that were constructed during the 1960s, 70s and early 80s, usually comprising a single, masonry-built block containing 4 to 8 walk-up apartments (though sometimes, many more), of between 2 and 3 stories in height, with car parking at the side or rear.
- Studio apartment: A self-contained unit with one main room, one bathroom, and some closet space. There is no distinct bedroom in a studio: sleeping, cooking, dining, living is all done in the main room. Another word for it is \'efficiency\'.
- Single Room Occupancy or SRO: A studio apartment, usually occurring with a block of many similar apartments, intended for use as public housing. They may or may not have their own washing, laundry, and kitchen facilities.
- Terraced house: Since the late 18th century is a style of housing where (generally) identical individual houses are conjoined into rows - a line of houses which abut directly on to each other built with shared party walls between dwellings whose uniform fronts and uniform height created an ensemble that was more stylish than a "rowhouse". However this is also the UK term for a "rowhouse" regardless of whether the houses are identical or not.
- Townhouse: also called rowhouse (US). In the UK, a townhouse is a traditional term for an upper class house in London (in contrast with country house), and is now coming into use as a term for new terraced houses, which are often three stories tall with a garage on the ground floor.
- Stacked townhouse: Units are stacked on each other; units may be multilevel; all units have direct access from the outside
- Triple decker: a three-family apartment house, usually of frame construction, in which all three apartment units are stacked on top of one another.
- Unit A type of Medium-density housing found in Australia and New Zealand.
See also
External links
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