text:
Townhouse
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
For the British use of the term, see Townhouse (Great Britain)
For the Scottish use of the term, see Seat of local government
Renaissance townhouses in Gdańsk, Poland
Typical 19th-century townhouses in Bremen, Germany
A townhouse, or town house as used in North America, Asia, Australia, South Africa and parts of Europe, is a type of terraced housing. A modern town house is often one with a small footprint on multiple floors. The term originally referred in British usage to the city residence (normally in London) of someone whose main or largest residence was a country house.
Contents
[hide]
1 Background
2 Europe
2.1 UK
3 North America
4 Asia, Australia, and South Africa
5 See also
6 Notes
7 Further reading
Background[edit]
Historically, a town house was the city residence of a noble or wealthy family, who would own one or more country houses in which they lived for much of the year. From the 18th century, landowners and their servants would move to a townhouse during the social season (when major balls took place).[1]
Europe[edit]
UK[edit]
In the United Kingdom most townhouses are terraced (see Terraced houses in the United Kingdom). Only a small minority of them, generally the largest, were detached, but even aristocrats whose country houses had grounds of hundreds or thousands of acres often lived in terraced houses in town. For example, the Duke of Norfolk owned Arundel Castle in the country, while his London house, Norfolk House, was a terraced house in St James's Square over 100 feet (30 meters) wide.
North America[edit]
In the United States and Canada, a townhouse has two connotations. The older predates the automobile and denotes a house on a small footprint in a city, but because of its multiple floors (sometimes six or more), it has a large living space, often with servants' quarters. The small footprint of the townhouse allows it to be within walking or mass-transit distance of business and industrial areas of the city yet luxurious enough for wealthy residents of the city.[2]
Townhouses in Portland, Oregon
Townhouse in East 30th Street, New York
Suburban style: a townhouse in Burke, Virginia
Townhouses are expensive where detached single-family houses are uncommon, such as in New York City, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Toronto, Washington, DC, and San Francisco.
Rowhouses are similar and consist of several adjacent, uniform units originally found in older, pre-automobile urban areas such as Baltimore, Charleston (South Carolina), Savannah, and New Orleans but now found in lower-cost housing developments in suburbs as well. A townhouse is where there is a continuous roof and foundation and a single wall divides adjacent townhouses, but some have a double wall with inches-wide air space in between on a common foundation. A rowhouse will generally be smaller and less luxurious than a dwelling called a townhouse.
The name townhouse or townhome was later used to describe non-uniform units in suburban areas that are designed to mimic detached or semi-detached homes. Today, the term, townhouse, is used to describe units mimicking a detached home that are attached in a multi-unit complex. The distinction between living units called apartments and those called townhouses is that townhouses usually consist of multiple floors and have their own outside door as opposed to having only one level and/or having access via an interior hallway or via an exterior balcony-style walkway (more common in the warmer climates). Another distinction is that in most areas of the US outside of the very largest cities, apartment refers to rental housing, and townhouse typically refers to an individually owned dwelling, although the term townhouse-style (rental) apartment is also heard.
Townhouses can also be "stacked". Such homes have multiple units vertically (typically two), normally each with its own private entrance from the street or at least from the outside. They can be side by side in a row of three or more, in which case they are sometimes referred to as rowhouses. A townhouse in a group of two could be referred to as a townhouse, but in Canada and the US, it is typically called a semi-detached home and in some areas of western Canada, a half-duplex.
In Canada, single-family dwellings, be they any type, such as single-family detached homes, apartments, mobile homes, or townhouses, for example, are split into two categories of ownership:
Condominium (strata title) where one owns the interior of the unit and also a specified share of the undivided interest of the remainder of the building and land known as common elements.
Freehold, where one owns exclusively the land and the dwelling without any condominium aspects. These may share the foundation as well but have narrow air spaces between and still referred to as a townhouse.
Condominium townhouses, just like condominium apartments, are often referred to as condos, thus referring to the type of ownership rather than to the type of dwelling. Since apartment style condos are the most common, when someone refers to a condo, many erroneously assume that it must be an apartment-style dwelling and conversely that only apartment-style dwellings can be condos. All types of dwellings can be condos, and this is therefore true of townhouses. A brownstone townhouse is a particular variety found in New York.
Asia, Australia, and South Africa[edit]
Boulevard du Lac in The Beverly Hills, a private townhouse development in Tai Po, Hong Kong
In Asia, Australia, and South Africa, the usage of the term follows the North American sense. Townhouses are generally found in complexes. Large complexes often have high security, resort facilities such as swimming pools, gyms, parks and playground equipment. Typically, a townhouse has a Strata Title; i.e., a type of title where the common property (landscaped area, public corridors, building structure, etc.) is owned by a corporation of individual owners and the houses on the property are owned by the individual owners.
In population-dense Asian cities dominated by high-rise residential apartment blocks, such as Hong Kong, townhouses in private housing developments remain almost exclusively populated by the very wealthy due to the rarity and relatively large sizes of the units. Prominent examples in Hong Kong include Severn 8, in which a 5,067-square-foot (470.7 m2) townhouse sold for HK$285 million (US$37 million) in 2008, or HK$57,000 (US$7,400) per square foot, a record in Asia, and The Beverly Hills, which consists of multiple rows of townhouses with some units as large as 11,000 square feet (1,000 m2).Commonly in the suburbs of major cities an old house on a large block of land is demolished and replaced by a short row of townhouses, built 'end on' to the street for added privacy.
See also[edit]
Home portal
Creole townhouse
Duplex
List of house types
Shophouse
Terraced house
Townhouse (Great Britain)
Sobrado (Portugal and Brazil)
Streetcar suburb
Notes[edit]
Jump up ^ For a description of an 18th-century town house in England, for example, see Olsen, Kirsten. Daily Life in 18th-Century England. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999, pp. 84–85.
Also see Stewart, Rachel. The Town House in Georgian London. Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2009.
Jump up ^ For a history of the town house in the United States, see Herman, Bernard L. Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780-1830. UNC Press Books, 2005.
Further reading[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Townhouses.
Cunningham, Peter. Handbook of London Past and Present, London, 1850 (see section 20: "Palaces & Chief Houses of the Nobility & Gentry in the Present Day).
Daisy, Countess of Fingall. Seventy Years Young. First published 1937 (autobiography of an Irish peer's wife, covering the late nineteenth and early twentieth century).
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Townhouse&oldid=804387461"
Categories:
Housing
House styles
Navigation menu
Personal tools
Not logged in
Talk
Contributions
Create account
Log in
Namespaces
Article
Talk
Variants
Views
Read
Edit
View history
More
Search
Navigation
Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikipedia store
Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact page
Tools
What links here
Related changes
Upload file
Special pages
Permanent link
Page information
Wikidata item
Cite this page
Print/export
Create a book
Download as PDF
Printable version
In other projects
Wikimedia Commons
Languages
العربية
Español
Euskara
한국어
Հայերեն
Bahasa Indonesia
Nedersaksies
日本語
Português
Русский
Simple English
Suomi
Svenska
ไทย
Українська
Edit links
This page was last edited on 8 October 2017, at 17:41.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Privacy policy
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Contact Wikipedia
Developers
Cookie statement
Mobile view
Enable previews

values: mw-page-base noprint

values: mw-head-base noprint

values: firstHeading firstHeading en

values: siteSub noprint

values: jump-to-nav mw-jump

attrs: href title

values:
note
hatnote navigation-not-searchable

attrs: alt src width height class srcset data-file-width data-file-height

attrs: href class title

values:
/wiki/Renaissance_(architecture)
mw-redirect
Renaissance (architecture)

values:
/wiki/Ball_(dance)
mw-redirect
Ball (dance)

values:
/wiki/Freehold_(real_property)
mw-redirect
Freehold (real property)

values: Edit section: Asia, Australia, and South Africa

values:
/wiki/The_Beverly_Hills
mw-redirect
The Beverly Hills

values: display:table-cell;padding:0.2em 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em;vertical-align:middle

values: margin:0.5em 0 0.5em 1em;border:solid #aaa 1px

values: Buildings and architecture of New Orleans

values:
reflist mw-references-wrap
list-style-type: decimal;

values:
catlinks mw-normal-catlinks
catlinks mw-normal-catlinks
interface

values: Discussion about edits from this IP address [ctrl-alt-n]

values: A list of edits made from this IP address [ctrl-alt-y]

values:
/wiki/Townhouse
View the content page [ctrl-alt-c]
c

values:
/wiki/Special:Random
Load a random article [ctrl-alt-x]
x

values: portal navigation p-navigation p-navigation-label

values: Guidance on how to use and edit Wikipedia

values: About the project, what you can do, where to find things

values: A list of recent changes in the wiki [ctrl-alt-r]

values: portal navigation p-interaction p-interaction-label

values: List of all English Wikipedia pages containing links to this page [ctrl-alt-j]

values: Recent changes in pages linked from this page [ctrl-alt-k]

values:
/wiki/Wikipedia:File_Upload_Wizard
Upload files [ctrl-alt-u]
u

values: A list of all special pages [ctrl-alt-q]

values: Permanent link to this revision of the page

values: portal navigation p-wikibase-otherprojects p-wikibase-otherprojects-label

values:
uls-settings-trigger
Language settings
0
button
true

values: تاون هاوس – Arabic

values: 타운하우스 – Korean

values: Թաունհաուս – Armenian

values: Таунхаус – Russian

values:
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Townhouse
Townhouse – Swedish
sv
sv
interlanguage-link-target

values: บ้านแถวในเมือง – Thai

values: /static/images/wikimedia-button-1.5x.png 1.5x, /static/images/wikimedia-button-2x.png 2x

values: /static/images/poweredby_mediawiki_132x47.png 1.5x, /static/images/poweredby_mediawiki_176x62.png 2x

values:
suggestions
display: none; font-size: 13px;

values: mediawiki ltr sitedir-ltr mw-hide-empty-elt ns-0 ns-subject page-Townhouse rootpage-Townhouse vector-experimental-print-styles vector-nav-directionality skin-vector action-view