# Would those Gilded Age mansions cost more or less to build today?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-those-gilded-age-mansions-cost-more-or-less-to-build-today/808500>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [February 9, 2018, 6:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-those-gilded-age-mansions-cost-more-or-less-to-build-today/808500 "2018-02-09T06:13:24Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![UDS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecae2f/32.png) [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)\
**Post date:** [February 13, 2018, 3:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-those-gilded-age-mansions-cost-more-or-less-to-build-today/808500/41 "2018-02-13T03:59:55Z")

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> [@md2000](#):
>
> As I said - I know of a lot of houses a lot younger that Biltmore, that have the very traditional window panes of about 8x10 inches in thin wood frames. (My brother-in-law owned a very large expensive house built around 1900 in New Jersey where every window was paned(?) this way, and the decorative bottom glass in the smaller top panes in the main rooms downstairs. My home in high school had a similar arrangement for the basement windows.
> 
> My point - it’s not that large glass panes were not available, but for some reason weren’t widely used until the last 50 years or so. (Post-WWII picture windwos) Cost? Worries about cost of window repairs?

They certainly were widely used. Small panes may have been chosen for aesthetic reasons, or in imitation of older building styles, but other choices were possible, and were made. [Here](http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-foreign-and-commonwealth-office-government-building-king-charles-street-41836331.html), for example, you can see the windows in the Foreign Office Building in London, completed in 1868. [Here’s](https://circaoldhouses.com/property/gorgeous-victorian-c-1890s/) an 1890s house from Hutto, Texas. [Here’s](http://www.brumm.com/photos/albums/Architecture/Victorians,%20Italianate/index.html) a selection of 1870s windows from San Francisco.

The development of float glass in the 1840s made large panes possible, and subsequent technological improvements made them cheap. Certainly from the 1870s onwards they were a standard element in the palette of design features available to architects and designers

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