I live in Chicago, in one of the city’s many neighborhoods populated by “victorian” houses - HUGE houses with gables and wraparound porches and turrets and so on. They’re huge - I mean, they look like they easily have somewhere between five and eight bedrooms, as well as vaulted cielings and so on. I’d estimate them at being thousands of square feet, larger than your average suburban house even though they’re right in the middle of the city. They go for at least $1 million, or in the 900K’s for especially small ones or ones in disrepair. They generally look like they datre back to the forties or before.
These houses are so big that many of them are broken up into multi-bedroom apartments for rent; I guess the owners couldn’t help but cash in on having all of that property at their disposal in these hot neighborhoods.
So, here’s my Q - who on earth were these houses originally owned by and meant for? They seem far too large to be single family homes, especially for the era that they were built in. Yet it seems that some have single families still living in them and have not been converted, though I imagine they’re doctors or lawyers considering the price tag.
Um, they were built for single families. History marches on; culture changes.
Watch some old movies, everything will fall into place.
I am basing this on the big townhouses you see in the UK - I am assuming the US was similar, so don’t hurt me if I’m wrong (not the face!).
Oddly enough, huge Victorian houses were built for huge Victorian households. As well as the fact that people tended to have more kids, it was not so unusual to have assorted grandparents, uncles, adult children and so on as part of the family unit. But mainly, the key things were social status and staff.
There would have been many more dedicated-purpose rooms to impress visitors - a separate dining room, parlour, drawing room, smoking room, study, etc. plus guest bedrooms.
Back when labour was cheap a well-off family might have a cook, a housekeeper and a maid or two. So the belowstairs bit (behind the green baize door) was reserved for them to do their work (kitchen, larder, scullery, coalroom, etc.) and usually the bit right up under the roof would be their living quarters.
Once you’ve carved off all the space for that lot, and then factored in that things back in olden days were a lot more primitive and clunky and needed more room (pianos, gaslights, coal fireplaces, aspidistras as opposed to hifis, bulbs, radiators and ferns) you begin to see why the houses were big. However, most people would have been living in tenements or terraced houses, so this was the exception rather than the rule.
Keep in mind that pre-Pill, most families had a lot of kids. My dad knew one with seventeen!
If the family was well-off, they’d have servants. Probably houskeeper and a maid, maybe a cook and scullery maid too. All of them need space. Then there’s the front parlour, back parlour, morning room, some sort of household office, pantries, dining room, servant’s sittingroom, billiards room, etc, etc, etc.
Never mind the Victorians. You should see some of the “Monster Houses” going up around here! There’s barely any lot left by the time the house goes up.