Terraced Houses

[DerbyBorn]

Why is the bit that usually has the kitchen and small back bedroom at a lower level than the rest of the house? Was it just cost saving or was it to so with roof construction

[Harry Bloomfield]

DerbyBorn submitted this idea :

I have not seen that all that much, but where I have seen it, it has usually been because the house is built on a hill side.

[Fredxx]

Are we talking of Victorian style houses?

In which case the rear room would have been the kitchen diner with a open fire, and what is now the kitchen would have been a scullery. Being wet, it would have been lower than the rest of the house.

[Robin]

I take it by "lower" you mean "lower ceilings". And I've been led to believe that results from the "back additions" being (a) not visible from the road and (b) not where visitors were entertained. Hence it would have been a waste to build them with high ceilings.

[Clive Arthur]

Yes, the main body of the house would be suspended wooden floors. IME the back room would be the main living room, the front room kept for best (unused most of the time!), and the kitchen/scullery a step down onto brick or quarry tile on earth. If there was a floor above that, it would have lower ceilings than the rest of the upper floor.

I don't know why, but much of the old Victorian housing in Reading is like that.

51.455429° -0.944911° in Google Earth for example, some with a first floor, some without.

Cheers

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Saves bricks and materials. The rear addition usually has lower ceilings.

[Terry Casey]

Not in the house I grew up in. There was a deep step down into the scullery and the doorway to the room above was where the staircase turned through 180°.

You went along the landing to the rear of the house, then down one step to a square intermediate landing with the door to the back room facing you. There was another step down through the doorway.

To continue descending you turned, in our case left, onto the staircase that turned though 90° in three or four steps then straight down to the hallway below.

[Steve Walker]

From the ones that I have seen, the floors are solid and lower down, with a step into the kitchen, while the rest of the house has suspended floors. Often there is a cellar under the main house, but not under the original build "extension".

SteveW

[michael adams]

The kitchen scullery had a tiled or bare concrete floor as it was subject to wet. The base of the adjacent dining living room and the front room for that matter were at the same level but with the floorboards took them up a level. The room above the scullery had a sloping roof - sloping to one side or the other and lower than the main roof which limited the ceiling height.

michael adams

...

[Robin]

I recognise that as common in Georgian houses (where the kitchen was the servants' domain to be kept apart from the main house) but not in the far more common terraces of Victorian houses for workers.

[newshound]

What they all said, but it is also commonly related to the lie of the land. In my first house (cul de sac of terraced, late victorian) the road line ran along the ridge so that for houses on both sides the ground fell away from front to rear. The front rooms had suspended floors and high ceilings and was two stories (and two rooms deep), the third set of rooms was three stories but staggered about 4 feet down from the middle ones (or 4 feet up to the top back bedroom, which had sloping ceilings).

[sm_jamieson]

Good answers to this.

I also find the stair-related features interesting in these type of houses. Where you have high ceilings in the main part of the house and then the "tunnel" to the kitchen at the height of the stair-case dogleg (often only at door height).

Also sometimes the back offshoot second floor rooms (e.g. bathroom) are at the height of the staircase dogleg, and then a few more steps up to the landing. Where the offshoot has been added there was often originally a nice big window at the back of the house that was turned into a door when the offshoot was added.

It all comes down to shoehorning stuff into the relatively small footprint available for housing in this Green Land.

I like the Victorian house some family friends lived in. Under the stairs was to be found not the descending steps to a cellar, but another parallel staircase going up to some hidden servant rooms at a lower level than the main house.

Simon.

[DJC]

For town houses with a lower ground floor below street level at the front and at garden level at the back, the street level was built up from soil removed to level the site. so the back is probably a little lower than the original 'green field' ground level and the front door reaches the built up bank that forms the roadway via a bridge to the retaining wall for the roadway which usually incorporates a coal cellar.

For many 18/19th C terraces the Kitchen/back bedroom was an addition and is accessed from the half landing of the original stairway. So it tends to be halfway between the front floor levels.

[Steve Walker]

Common around here, but just normal terraces not designed for servants - even the small, workers' ones.

Just a couple of examples.

2nd house used to belong to my mother's parents.

No. 9 used to belong to my father's parents.

SteveW

[Mark]

There are variations on this but with the two I own in London on level ground there is step down to the rear kitchen and back room which are on solid ground the rear of the house above is 3 floors the front with a cellar underneath is 2 floors and the roof line is level front to back more rooms in what is from the front a small looking house 4 bed 3 recp, kitchen +box room before you convert the attic and dig out the basement

[harry]

It's to do with natural daylight. Terrace houses only have windows front and rear. To illuminate them, windows had to be tall so ceilings also have to be high. Less important in kitchens. Even more so in "back to back" houses.

You also find this in buildings with very large rooms. Eg"Stately homes".

All to do with there being only very limited artificial lighting.

[Brian Gaff]

Mine is not like that, you are generalising. I mean some are built on hills, and others have had internal modifications done over the years. It very much depends on when it was built. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

There are some in Redhil where the small box room upstairs has a wall that has an angled bit near the floor over the stairwell to allow taller people to climb the stairs without knocking themselves out. For the want of a few more inches in depth, this would not be required. Mine has this done on ceilings near the eaves to allow the roof to come down almost to the top of the windows upstairs, then there are corner fireplaces huge chimney breasts in two rooms like mine taking up a lot of space, and so on. The building of houses seems sometimes to defy logic, but it obviously made sense at the time! Brian

[Harry Bloomfield]

Brian Gaff formulated on Friday :

My semi has the small bedroom over the stair. It has a cupboard space in that bedroom above the stair, the base of which is a few feet up from the bedroom floor. That to allow for extra stair headroom.

[Rob Morley]

Solid floor for the kitchen and suspended timber floor for the rest of the house? Possibly to give the kitchen range somewhere solid and fireproof to sit on?