A townhouse, townhome, town house, or town home is a type of terraced housing or close-set single family homes of several stories. A modern townhouse is often one with multiple floors on a small footprint. In older British usage, the term originally referred to any type of city residence (normally in London) of someone whose main or largest residence was a country house.
History Historically, a townhouse 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).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. Stewart, Rachel. The Town House in Georgian London. Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2009.
United States and Canada 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, which because of its multiple floors (sometimes six or more) 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.For a history of the townhouse 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.
Townhouses are expensive where detached single-family houses are uncommon, such as in New York City, Philadelphia, Montreal, and San Francisco. A brownstone townhouse is a particular variety found in New York and to some extent in Philadelphia and Boston.
United Kingdom
See also
Creole townhouse Duplex List of house types Multi-family residential Pied-à-terre Shophouse Sobrado (Portugal and Brazil) Streetcar suburb Tenement Terraced house Townhouse (Great Britain)
References
Further reading 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 in 1937 (autobiography of an Irish peer's wife, covering the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries).
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