20 new york homes list with architecture and sale details

A large city house is a narrow problem solved upwards. The lot is a slot: perhaps twenty feet across and four or five times as deep. Both long walls are shared with the neighbors, so they carry no windows. Light arrives at the front and the back and nowhere else. Almost everything that looks strange about the plan of a big row house follows from those three facts, and once you see them the house stops being a collection of period details and becomes a machine with a logic you can follow.

What to take away

• Lot width and party walls set the plan of a city house. Read the constraint first, the style second.
• The back stair, the light well and the position of the kitchen say more about how a house was used than any surviving fireplace.
• Height is cheap to build and expensive to live with. Stairs, not floor area, decide whether a tall house works.

Why the plan runs upwards

Because the two side walls are blind, rooms have to be strung front to back along a corridor or stacked one behind another. Deep in the middle of the plan there is a zone that no window can reach. That dead zone is where the stair goes, and where the bathrooms, closets and pantries went once plumbing arrived. A room that needs daylight is pushed to an end wall; a room that does not is pulled into the core. Look at a floor plan of a big terraced or row house and you can usually draw a line down it separating served rooms from serving ones.

The other consequence is the raised entrance. Lifting the main floor half a level puts the service floor at grade rather than fully underground, which gives the kitchen a window and a separate door. That is what the steps up to the front door are actually for. The formal floor above them gets the ceiling height and the tall windows, because it was the floor visitors saw.

Twenty things worth reading on a large city house

Outside, work from the ground up.

1. The height of the front steps, which tells you how far the service floor sits below the formal one.
2. Whether there is a separate lower door, and where it leads.
3. The rhythm of the windows: are they evenly spaced, or grouped to mark the important room?
4. Window height by floor, which almost always shrinks as you go up.
5. Lintels and sills, and whether they are stone, cast iron or molded brick.
6. The bond pattern of the brickwork, and whether the front is a better brick than the sides.
7. The cornice line, and whether it matches the neighbors or breaks the run.
8. Roof shape at the front: flat behind a parapet, or a visible slope with dormers.
9. Chimney stacks, which count the original heated rooms.
10. Any change of material partway up, which usually marks a later addition.

Inside, the plan tells the rest.

11. Where the main stair sits, and how much of the width it eats.
12. Whether a second, narrower stair survives, and which rooms it connects.
13. Ceiling height on the main floor compared with the floor above.
14. Which room has the deepest cornice and the most plaster, because that was the room that mattered.
15. Door widths, since a service door is narrower and plainer on both faces.
16. The position of the kitchen, and how far it is from where food was eaten.
17. Any light well, shaft or borrowed window pulling daylight into the core.
18. Fireplace positions, which show whether flues were gathered into one stack.
19. Floor finishes changing at a threshold, which marks where the family stopped and staff began.
20. Radiator or duct routes, which reveal how a house built for coal fires was later heated.

Photographs of surveyed houses make this easier to practice before you visit anything. The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog holds a great deal of architectural survey material, including elevations and interiors of houses that no longer stand. The measured drawings that accompany much of it come from the Historic American Buildings Survey, and a plan with a section settles questions a photograph cannot.

What the arrangement costs to live in

A tall narrow house asks you to climb. If the kitchen is on one floor, the living rooms on another and the bedrooms two above that, an ordinary evening involves more vertical distance than most people expect. Owners of large row houses tend to end up living on two floors and treating the rest as storage, which is the same failure that afflicts very wide houses for the opposite reason.

Heat behaves badly too. A stairwell running the full height of the building is a chimney: warm air leaves the lower floors and collects at the top, so the ground floor is cold while the top floor is stifling. Any serious upgrade has to deal with that shaft before it deals with the windows.

Sound travels the same route. Party walls are usually the quietest part of the structure, and the stair the loudest. If you are comparing a city house with the detached kind covered under mansions, the trade is privacy from neighbors against privacy from your own household.

The maintenance bill is set by the envelope, not the floor area. A tall front with heavy cornice work, a parapet and a flat roof behind it has more to go wrong per square foot than a simple pitched roof over a wider plan. That is why two houses of the same size can have completely different running costs, a point developed further in new york homes and in the material comparisons under architecture and interiors.

Common questions

Why do so many large city houses have their best room on the first floor up?

Because the ground floor was for arrival and service, and the floor above it was for entertaining. Lifting the main room got it above street dirt and noise, and gave it the tallest windows on the front.

Does a wider lot always make a better house?

Not automatically. Extra width usually goes into a bigger stair hall and deeper rooms, and a deep room without side windows can end up darker than a narrow one. Width helps most when it buys a second window wall or a side light well.

How do you tell an original stair from a later one?

Look at how it meets the structure. An original stair lines up with the floor framing and the wall openings; a later one tends to cut across a window, land awkwardly in a room, or sit in a space with patched cornice work around it.

What should I look at if the interior has been stripped?

The shell still speaks. Window positions, flue locations, changes in ceiling height and the scars of removed partitions survive most refits. The techniques carry over to other cities, which is why the reading order in los angeles homes architecture and the room studies in los angeles homes interiors start from the same evidence.