Under One Roof and Beyond the Fence: Eleven Farmhouses, Cottages and Working Homes

Start with the method rather than the house. Post-and-plank fills a timber frame with horizontal planks or logs, and it is believed to be the predecessor of half-timber building, which fills its frame with wattle and daub, brick or stone. It was used from parts of Scandinavia to Switzerland to western Russia, and two variants survive in North America.

The byre-dwelling puts the family and the livestock and grain barn under one roof. Archaeological sites in northwestern Europe show the arrangement from the Bronze Age, and Mennonites originating from the Netherlands used it in more modern times; where only a byre shares the roof, American English calls it a housebarn.

The Middle German house is a byre-dwelling of central Germany, in timber frame or stone, common from the fifteenth century when two stories became standard. Its plan has three zones, the Stube living room, the central Flur or Ern for cooking, and the working area for livestock, and its roof rests on the outer walls rather than on internal posts.

The Geestharden house is one of three basic farmhouse forms in Schleswig-Holstein. Living and working areas sit under one roof but are kept apart in a transverse layout, with a thatched half-hipped roof on a two-post system. On the flood-prone islands of North Frisia the Uthland-Frisian variant kept its posts near the outer walls so that the upper story would survive storm flooding.

Across the Atlantic the farmhouse became colonial. Bandeirista architecture belongs to the old Sao Paulo Province, most intense in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a multi-use great hall, a porch between two social rooms and a four-sloped roof. Only a few examples remain, such as the Butanta House, and the entry is sourced from the Mannerism in Brazil article because no standalone article exists.

Now the farm becomes a pleasure. A ferme ornée is an estate laid out partly for looks and partly for farming, a term drawn from Stephen Switzer in 1715. Woburn Farm by Philip Southcote is the original, and Marie Antoinette later built the Hameau de la Reine at Versailles between 1783 and 1787, more for pleasure than food.

The cottage orné is the same taste at house scale: a rustic stylised cottage of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, linked to the Romantic movement and its reaction against Baroque and Neoclassical formality. English Heritage defines it as a rustic building of picturesque design, and examples often have well-shaped thatch roofs with ornate timberwork.

Świdermajer shows the rustic look reaching the middle class. These wooden villas line the railway from Warsaw to Otwock, with the village of Świder regarded as the style capital. Local timber building is combined with wide Swiss-influenced roofs, Russian vernacular porches and details from the Zakopane Style, and the name blends Biedermeier with the river Świder.

The gablefront house turns the end of the building toward the street. It spread after 1825 with American Greek Revival, whose builders treated the gable as a temple pediment, and it was built across the United States into the 1920s. It began as a simple working-class dwelling, and later examples added brackets and porches or borrowed Gothic Revival and Queen Anne detail.

Colony houses were model housing built in Edinburgh between 1850 and 1910 for artisans and skilled working families. Each was one of a pair of stacked flats with its own front door and garden, four rooms and a separate outside toilet. The Edinburgh Cooperative Building Company, founded in 1861, built eleven more colony sites and completed more than two thousand houses by 1911.

End in the city with stone. Greystones in Chicago are mostly Bedford limestone from Indiana, with roughly 30,000 examples built as semi-detached or detached townhouses. The word is also used for Montreal, where the French term pierre grise names grey limestone facades built between 1730 and 1920.