In Japan it's normal to demolish a house and rebuild from scratch on the newly cleared just-purchased ground.Īnd new homes reflect the needs and values of their owners. In other countries, they are considerably younger: in Germany homes depreciate after first sale, while in the US, they typically require extensive structural renovation or rebuilding after 30 years (continental climes are prone to greater environmental extremes). In the UK, the average dwelling is 75 years old. The older style of tenement, focussed on a windowless central room off which all other rooms opened, still existed but was becoming rarer. (I speculate that the intent was to keep the smells of cooking, smoke, and privy as far away as possible from the dining and living areas commonly used by the owner and his wife and children.) By 1820 the corridor had become an unremarkable space around which homeowners were now structuring their lives. Bedrooms open off at various points: the front door is at the point of the 'V'. My apartment is laid out around an odd, V-shaped corridor, with two arms: one leads to the kitchen, bathroom, store rooms, and front door, while the other leads to the dining room and living room. Staircases ascended through grand halls at the centre of such houses (accessible from doors leading to the main function rooms around the periphery): servants' areas such as the kitchen, stores, and pantry might boast their own staircases, and the master apartments of a great house had their own stairs leading to privy or ground floor.īut the corridor in its modern, contemporary sense seems to have started out as a narrowing and humbling of the grand halls and assembly rooms of state, reduced in scope to a mere conduit for the workers who kept things running-before, of course, they later became commonplace. Splendid wide main doors in the centre of each wall provided access for nobility and people of merit: much smaller, unadorned doors near the corners allowed servants to scuttle unobtrusively around the edges of the court.
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The great houses of that period were laid out as a series of rooms of increasing grandeur, each leading to the next. Holyrood largely dates to the 16th and 17th century, and reflects the norms of that earlier era, and if you tour it one thing is noteworthy by its absence: corridors.
Rewind another 200 years and look around a surviving great house, such as Holyrood Palace, also in Edinburgh. And where one has servants, one perforce has corridors so that they may move about the dwelling out of sight of the owners. This apartment was built around 1820, for the builder of the tenement it's part of: he was a relatively prosperous Regency working man and his family would have included servants as a matter of course in those days. There is a privy (now a flushing toilet). And so on.īut certain features of a 200 year old apartment remain constant. The dining room is no longer a dining room, it serves as a library (despite switching to ebooks a decade ago I have a big book problem). What I suspect was once the servants' bedroom is now a windowless storeroom. Three rooms have false ceilings, lowered to reduce heating costs before hollowcore loft insulation was a thing. The coal-burning fireplaces are either blocked or walled over. The kitchen has shrunk, a third of it hived off to create a modern (albeit small) bathroom. Like any building in continuous occupation for nearly 200 years, form and function have changed: it's been retrofitted with indoor plumbing, gas central heating, electricity, broadband internet. I live in an ancient city, in a medium-old apartment-one that is rapidly approaching its bicentennial.
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