Names for different types of housing

Here a “garden flat” is a nice way of saying that you’re living in the basement of a Georgian Terrace house. It’s a “garden flat” because your back door will open directly out onto the gargen (yard).

Many of the bigger Georgian and Victorian terraced houses have been divided into flats, with a 1, 2 or 3 bedroom flat on each floor (depending on the size of the room, and whether they have been further divded with partition walls or not). Originally those houses would have been 5 or 6 bedrroms, 3 reception rooms and servants quarters. So you could live in a flat, in a terrraced house.

Mews houses are houses built at the back of these Georgian and Victorian houses, usually at the end of the garden, either as a renovation of a coach-house or servants quarters, or simply on the site where they would previously have been.

Mews houses have their own entrances through the back lane, originally where the coaches would have driven. They are often small (1 or 2 bedrooms) but can be quite large as obviously the larger and grander the main house, the larger and grander the coach-house would be.

They are popular with architects looking to build original and exciting new properties in a nice area, where otherwise it would be difficult to get an appropriate piece of land or planning permission to build.

Here are some examples in Dublin:
A Georgian terrace
http://www.sherryfitz.ie/sf2003.exe?pageref=res_property&propid=SMP01665&pagemode=res

A Victorian Semi-detached House
http://www.sherryfitz.ie/sf2003.exe?pageref=res_property&propid=STP02579&pagemode=res

A Mews house
http://www.sherryfitz.ie/sf2003.exe?pageref=res_property&propid=SMP01690&pagemode=res

A Garden flat
http://www.sherryfitz.ie/sf2003.exe?pageref=res_property&propid=SMP01674&pagemode=res

If you do click on the links, be warned, Dublin house prices are not for the faint-hearted. You’ll be grateful for the property market where you live, trust me.

1 USD=0.82 Euro
1 Euro=1.20USD

GingerOfTheNorth writes:

> I’ve been told that what I live in is a rowhouse, and if I call it a townhouse, I’m
> just “being uppity.”

GingerOfTheNorth and Weirddave live in a classic Baltimore rowhouse. Coming to their street (although it’s actually just outside of Baltimore) is like entering the set of a Barry Levinson or John Waters movie. And many Baltimoreans are downright pretentious about their unpretentiousness.

Please clarify, irishgirl; I fear I may be misinterpreting those descriptions.

Let’s take your last link as an example, the ‘garden flat’. Am I correct in assuming the realtor is talking about only the ground floor of the building in the picture, on the level whose windows are within the stone facing? And the three bedrooms and everything are on that floor. And, if you go up the front stairs, you are in a different residence?

And that’s a million euros for a residence that basically boils down to what we would call a basement apartment? (A very nice one, to be sure, and actually above ground level, but still…). Yike.

(BTW, is that an actual purchase? So other people would own the top part of the hpouse and the ones next door? Is there an entity that owns the common elements of the building (shared and structural walls, driveways, etc) and charges a monthly fee for their maintenance? If so, that’s what we would call a condominium. )

Rereading your description, I see that those houses (originally five bedrooms? Servant’s quarters? Reception rooms?) are considerably larger than anything normally built here, until you get into fully-detached houses (or luxury penthouse levels at the top of apartment towers). No wonder they can be divided up so successfully.

For comparison, they built some townhouses not far from where I live, on the site of an unsuccessful shopping plaza. They are three storeys tall, each above a garage that is partly set below ground level. They sold for about $650,000 Canadian each. And we thought that was expensive.

Yup, the Garden flat is only the lower floor of the house, and the guide price is 2 million euros!

Admittedly, it’s in a very desirable location, and at the top end of the market, but believe me, someone is going to pay that much for it. For a 1 bed apartment in Dublin, you’re talking at least 250,000euro, once you add in a nice location, and more bedrooms, things get start to get silly, price-wise.

You would own the flat and have shared access to the garden, you’d be responsbile for any repairs to your part of the building, and expected to decide between yourself and the building’s other residents how repairs and upkeep of common areas are to be split between you.

There would not usually be a management committee (usually only for larger, more modern apartment complexes).

Don’t get me wrong, we have smaller, more modern bungalows, apartments, terraces, ec, I just chose some examples of housing types most Dopers might not be used to.

Townhouse: individual houses which possess 0 property on either side.

Here in the Chicago area, a building with four living units is called an “apartment building”, but if you asked a person living in such a building what sort of apartment building he or she would probably say “It’s a four-flat” although they’d still call the unit they were renting “my apartment”.

Duplexes might be called a two-flat. I’ve also heard three-flat and six flat, but oddly enough not five-flat, although at the moment, come to think of it, I’m living in just that - two units on the first floor and three on the second.

Over six, it’s “an apartment building” or “multi-unit building”.