Whenever one of Saffey’s friends mentions that her house is fancy she always downplays it by saying, “Well, it is semi-detached.” What the heck does this mean? Why does it make the house less affluent?
I believe it’s when part of the house is accessed by going down stairs. As opposed to a two storey house, which is one floor directly underneath, semi-detached is only half a storey alongside each other.
I think.
No, a semi-detached is one joined to one other by a party wall. It is mid-way between a free-standing house and a terrace.
picmr
I think you call them duplex’s correct me if I’m wrong.
Property is incredibly expensive over here and far smaller too.
We are a class divided society and one way of keeping it going is address snobbery.
Living in a detatched or standalone property is considered to be higher in status and in London if you can afford such a property it usually shouts money at you.
My parents’ house is a semi-detached row house. All it means is that you occupy all the floors in the building but the building is sandwiched between two others. It’s not a detached house (house with space around it), and it’s not a duplex (which in Montreal means one household is one story and another household is another story in the same building.)
There are lots of semi-detached houses in my town, almost all are owned by the government public housing authority.
They consist of a three bedroomed house attached to another via a common wall, the floorplan of the other house being the mirror image of the first. They share the same roof, but each house has its own front and back yards, and driveway.
The British equivalent of a standard “house in the suburbs” in the U.S. is a semi-detached house. The two families share a wall but there is no access from one family’s property to another except by going out to the street and coming back. They each have a one-car garage and a small yard (although they would call it a garden, and there is a lot of peer pressure to keep your garden looking good). The garden is usually fenced with a small brick wall. The house has three bedrooms, although only one is decently sized by American standards, while a second is rather small and a third little larger than an American walk-in closet.
Casdave is right, they are called duplexes over here. I haven’t seen that many around California, except in some places, and they’re usually around 20-30 years old. Mostly in the suburbs you have townhouses, which are usually narrow, with several stories, and built with no or only a small amount of clearance between each unit.
panama jack
If it’s sandwiched between two others, in what sense is it detached at all?
Nah! That’s a terrace house not a semi-detatched.
In good old clog wearing coal-mining Yorkshire we have row on row of them.
Now I wonder what Americans would make of back-to-backs , rabbit hutches probably.
Yes, separated by a common language.
Semi-detached sounds not so very well built to me.
Terrace is a place with no roof.
Flat has low ceilings.
TEnts, how about tents?
Where I live, a dwelling for two familys divided only by an interior firewall is a duplex. In the case of a row of dwellings designed for multiple familys and sharing a common exterior, they are called town houses (same thing as row houses), in either case the family has both the upstairs and downstairs. If you live above or below someone else, it’s simply an apartment. Not sure about the “detached” thing.
In a semi-detatched the party wall is usually double course brickwork with an air gap of a couple of inches in between.The two walls are normally linked to each other with metal ties.
Onwards to back-to-backs.
These were originally very cheap to construct and you find them in industrial inner city areas.Most date from before WWI but there were significant additions as well as replacement of WWII damage.
These houses have three party walls.The house only has frontage ,so that in a row, the houses at one side are differant properties to those at the other.They tend to be extremely small but the room heights are tall making for usual proportions.
There is usually no garden and no hallway so it is straight onto the street from your main room.Right up into the 60’s they did not have bathrooms or toilets, for that you had to go outside to the privy block situated in the breaks between the rows.As for a bath, well you had to go to the local public baths or else you had to get the metal bathtub out and since it was too much to be hauling buckets of water about to fill it you generally bathed in the front room.
Tens of thousand were demolished and the residents housed in city funded high rise apartments and new estates the social failure of which is a whole topic in itself.
There are still many thousands left and the proper facilities have been installed ,usually at the cost of a bedroom.
Things have not changed much in terms of the people housed therein, they are still among the poorest often they are of Asian, African, Irish backgrounds.Those near universities which is generally a good proportion of them are full of students.
If you ever come here as a tourist don’t just go round the obvious sites, take a look at the housing as well but do it with an informed guide. You will learn more about the British phsyche than any amount of museums.
We are ,as a nation, obsessed with property (real estate)
Jeez, I was hoping for a simple answer. Now I’m all confused…
How can you still be confused?
Detached house - house all by itself
Terraced house - a row of houses joined together side by side
Semi Detached - two houses joined together side by side
Tenament block - apartments / flats. In Edinburgh and Glasgow usually 3-4 floors high with 3 or 4 flats on each landing. The main door serves the flats upstairs and there will usually be two main door flats on the ground floor with their own access (costing more)
Upper / lower villa - the top or bottom half of a detached or semi-detached house which has been split into two
Bungalow - one storey, either detached or semi-detached
Town house - 3 (sometimes 4) floors high, usually terraced
These terms are all Scottish, although some are also used in England and Wales - they don’t always mean the same.
Splendid Edinburgh based house market can be found at http://www.espc.co.uk
Russell
Russell