Not necessarily. My house faces west, but the front door faces north. We have a neighbor whose house faces west and her front door faces south.
I feel like an idiot for asking this, but can you show me a picture of how this would look? I always thought that the front door and the house both face the street.
I’m a little confused, too. In my vernacular, a house “faces” the direction its front door is on. If the front door is on the south, then the house faces south.
I once lived in a house where the street was to the south of the house, and the garage was on the south side of the house, but the “front door” was on the east side of the house. We would often be coming in and out through the garage on the south side of the house, but company would always go around to the door on the east side of the house.
I can’t remember that we ever described the house as “facing” one way or another, but it makes sense to me to say that the side nearest the street is the direction the house “faces”.
This building isn’t a house, but it kind of shows how ours is positioned (although backwards from ours.) Essentially the house has a bit of an L shape and the front door faces sideways.
If you watch this intro from the show, you can clearly see that the front doors of both houses are facing the street opposite of each other.
How is it possible that both front doors are facing the same direction? If one is facing right then the other has to be facing the other direction. The only way this would make sense is if the camera in one house faces one direction, and the camera in the other house faces the opposite direction.
I was watching I Love Lucy this afternoon, and noticed that the Ricardo’s apartment had a back door from the kitchen that opened into a yard or garden, yet Ethel and Fred rarely came in that way.
OTOH, the Petries on the Dick Van Dyke Show had a sliding door in the kitchen, on the same side of the house as the front door, and next door neighbors Millie and Jerry used both.
Meanwhile, on *The Honeymooners *Ed Norton would come in through the Kramden’s fire escape, which was oddly located right next to the apartment door – in a tenement.
And you people are worried about which way the front door swings?
My couch is like that, but I did it deliberately to emulate how they do that on shows.
My grandparents briefly lived in a condo where they pretty much had no choice but to have their couch that way if they wanted to have it facing the TV.
Other than that, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it that way in realsies. I have seen one of those stupid L shaped couches where instead of putting it in a corner they have it against one wall and then it sticks out into the middle of the room after the bend, which is sort of the same.
The fourth wall isn’t static. Say Ray’s front door is north. The fourth wall at his house would be east, whereas Marie’s front door could be south and have a western fourth wall.
I don’t see any reason why the camera couldn’t be facing different directions in different houses. In a typical living room sitcom set the camera is located on an imaginary wall that has no doors and faces the couch. In real life people’s doors can be in different places and we don’t all arrange our rooms with couches that face the same direction.
If the living room in my apartment were to become the setting for a sitcom then the arrangement of my furniture and the location of the front door and doors into my kitchen and bedroom mean that only the south wall would work as the “fourth wall”. But in this same building the living room of my upstairs neighbors is configured in such a way that their north wall would make the best “fourth wall”.