And one other note, inspired by another thread: ‘motor home’ and ‘mobile home’ are not the same. A motor home is a type of motor vehicle; it’s an RV. I think the expression ‘RV’ is a lot more common these days.
Let’s see what I can come up with for my little world (may or may not reflect the rest of the state, but is fairly close) -
House - any single family residence not attached to any other residence.
Ranch - single story house (possibly with basement) usually has attached garage.
Bi-level - two story house, usually has two flights of stairs just inside the front entrance, bottom floor is “garden level” or half-ass basement. May or may not have attached garage
Tri-level - offset floors, main level has a short drop to the next level down (3-5 steps) and a larger rise (~8) to the upper floor which is on top of the lower floor and off to the side of the main. May have a basement under the main and usually has a garage under the top floor.
Apartment - group of rented dwellings in a building
Condo - just like an apartment except you own it.
Townhouse - condo’s that are smooshed together side-by-side rather than stacked in apartment fashion.
Duplex - two houses sharing a common wall.
Nope… it’s just that I don’t exactly know what a caravan is! I think of it as being a trailer, but often kind of permanently moored. In other words, an RV with mobile-home characteristics. Could well be wrong, though.
Channeling Nava here, but I think I’m correct: for “sky station” read station de ski – a ski resort, in other words.
We call those studios in California too. Or “singles”. I think originally a ‘studio’ was a big well-lighted single room with glass walls and skylights, intended to be used by a real artist as an actual studio, but now it’s pretty much interchangeable with “single”, AFAIK.
A peculiar Americanism seems to be using the word “home” to mean “house”, as in the building. We don’t actually use it that way in conversation, but houses are often advertised that way, so you might see a sign advertising “30 New Townhomes”, or “Vista Del Fuego Phase II - 2,3, and 4 Bedroom Homes from $350”.
Paul Fussell, in Class, decried this usage as a vulgar selling ploy, and I think he was right.
Oh! That’s totally not what I would have thought, but makes sense.
I had a vision of the stations one would have for flying buses or subway trains or something, like ones in the lines of aerial traffic on the planet Coruscant in St6ar Wars. 
Was Se7en some kind of bizarre sequel to that?
‘Studio apartment’ seems to be used around here a lot for what I call a “zero-bedroom” apartment, and which others call a ‘bachelor apartment’: an apartment with no separate bedroom, but a combined living/sleeping/dining space. It will probably have a separate kitchen, and must have a separate bathroom.
Yes. The marketers around here use ‘home’ to mean ‘house’ as well, and it annoys me a lot. A home is the social construct created by the inhabitants of a house. (Or not. Depending on how Dysfunctional Family Robinson they are.)
I know why they do it, of course: they want to give buyers the warm fuzzies just before they sign the paperwork. But it’s imprecise English.
I find that barn conversions get referred to simply as ‘houses’, or as ‘barn’ or ‘converted barn’, depending on the context. Similarly warehouse conversion/flat/apartment. Most old railway stations are pretty much treated as normal houses, and likewise for old pubs, mills, etc.
Mexico:
Casa = House
Casa sola = Detached single family home
Departamento = Apartment
Residencia = Luxurious house (e.g., it’s not a house, it’s a residence)
Cuarto = Room (as in a boarding house)
Hacienda/Finca/Quinta = Estate (usu. rural)
Condominio = Usually refers to what in the U.S. would be a townhouse, while the cognate “condominium” generally refers to an apartment condo in my experience. Also often referred to as “condominio horizontal”.
Unidad = Public housing development
Penthouse (aka Pent House) = Same as English, top floor of a building
Loft (recently introduced to lexicon) = same
I should also mention the “teardown” – small, typically postwar house on a large lot in a desirable town. It’s often replaced by a McMansion.
Unless they especially resemble a normal detached house after conversion, they may remain uncategorised, even if they would technically fit into a category (‘converted rustic apple barn’, ‘converted Victorian railway station with decorative ironwork’ and the like sound much better on the estate agents’ bills, and in genteel conversation with those you wish to impress)
for middle-west America, add:
Mobile Home, which isn’t mobile at all
Loft, an apartment in an old industrial building with tall ceilings (might be rented or owned)
Cabin a small rustic weekend place in the woods or by a lake
Oh, in the UK:
- Mobile home = (usually) a motorised vehicle with living space - like a Winnebago, although nearly always smaller
- Caravan = a towable living space, usually capable of being moved by a car.
- Static Caravan - a fairly large accomodation unit that can be moved (albeit with some fuss and bother, and requiring a heavy vehicle such as a lowloader and possibly a crane).
That’s exactly what Fussell thought, in regard to how the term came to be used that way. He goes on to point to the fact that you never hear of a “cathome” or a “beachhome”; both these things being far out of the reach or ken of the middle class, they escape the effects of mass marketing.
Apaato (Apartment) - A unit within a larger building available for rent. Apartments are usually on the cheap end of the scale, with few amenities. As a general rule, if your building name includes the word “Haitsu” (Heights), it’s down at the even lower end of the scale. No idea why, that’s just my own observation.
Manshon (Mansion) - Completly different from the English meaning of the word. A mansion is a unit within a larger building available for sale or rent. The difference between an apartment and a mansion is that mansions are better-built, have more amenities, and more typically occupied by long-term residents. They are also more expensive. If you see an ad for a new building in the newspaper or subway, it’s probably a mansion.
Apartments and Mansions have the following classifications
One Room - Self explanatory.
1K - One room, plus a kitchen. The kitchen is usually just big enough for a fridge, a gas range top and a sink, leaving maybe four or five square feet of open floor space.
1DK, 2DK, 3DK, etc. - 1, 2 or 3 bedrooms, plus a “dining kitchen”, which is a kitchen large enough to put a table in and use as a room in its own right.
1LDK, 2LDK, 3LDK, etc. - 1,2, or 3 bedrooms, plus a “large dining kitchen” or “living dining kitchen”, which is a large room (living room / dining room combo) with a kitchen attached to it.
Right now I live with my wife, son and MIL in a 4LDK mansion.
Ikkenya (One-building House) - A traditional house, with its own land.
Bungalow condos are becoming fairly common in this part of the world. The attraction of them seems to be that you get the benefits of fully detached and separate housing, while using the condo fees to pay for exterior maintenance such as snow removal or yard work.
Here in the Mile High City (Denver) we apparently have run out of ‘old industrial buildings’ and are building brand new buildings to contain our lofts. At premium prices, of course.
Bob
The biggest deviation in New Zealand from the rest of the world seems to be our use of the word ‘flat’. There’s probably a huge list of additions and exceptions, but basically a flat is a rented property of any kind. I’d describe the last three or four places I’ve lived in as flats, even though they have all quite clearly been houses (either fully- or semi-detached).
But if a family rents a house, they probably wouldn’t describe it as a ‘flat’. The word only seems to be used when a youngish person lives with non-relatives (flatmates) for the purpose of sharing rent, or if the property is too small to be described as a house.
I have a couple of friends who have been together for a good 5 years and are as good as married (we’re really just waiting for the announcement). They rent a house together, and they share quite a few of their finances, but they still refer to their joint bank account as their “flat account”.
Oh yeah, an exclusively Kiwi residential concept is the ‘bach’ (pronounced ‘batch’ rather than ‘Bach’). They are normally fairly crappy little houses near to a beach. People will often go down to the family bach over the Christmas-New Year period and swim, have a barbecue, and/or get drunk.
What you call “mobile home” can be a “double-wide” if there’s two of them snapped together like so . Also called “trailer homes” and can be found in trailer parks and further down the road I live on.
Ranch homes here – often sprawling single-story.
Split-level – sort of a one-and-a-half story detached house. I never knew why these existed but I thought they were awfully cool in the 80s.