Reading the Regency

A Glossary of Property Terms - part 2

Storeys

"...a half-circular turret, battlemented, or, to use the appropriate phrase, bartizan'd on the top, served as a case for a narrow turnpike stair, by which an ascent was gained from storey to storey."
[The Heart of Mid-Lothian, by Sir Walter Scott]

For the benefit of readers whose countries use a different system, in Britain they used the following to describe the different storeys or levels of a house:

Basement refers to habitable rooms that are below ground or partially below ground. These might include the kitchen, servant's hall, or butler's pantry. Although cellars were also below ground, cellars were rooms for storage only, like the coal cellar, or the wine cellar. If a basement was half below ground, they might have narrow windows at the top of the room to let in light.

The ground floor is level with the ground outside the house, or could be raised slightly above street level to accommodate a partially below ground basement. In that case, you might climb a few steps to reach the ground floor.

The first floor is the level you reach after climbing one set of stairs to reach the level immediately above the ground floor. In a townhouse, the first floor would have noticeably larger windows as the primary rooms were located on the first floor.

The second floor is the level you reach after climbing the stairs to reach the level immediately above the first floor.

The attic level is the level just beneath the roof, usually with much smaller, low-ceilinged rooms, and much smaller windows. Only the grander houses tended to have an attic floor. Many houses went straight from the second floor to the garret/attic in the roof space.

Garrets are rooms that may be formed inside the angled pitch of the roof space, if the roof was big enough. They were sometimes called attics in houses where there was no attic level. They would be reached by a much narrower staircase than used in the rest of the house. Often used for storage, they could also be used to house servants. In poorer areas, they were rented as lower cost accommodation. Because of this, garrets were associated with starving poets or artists.

Very few houses during the Regency period went above five floors, including the basement and garrets. However, streets that were originally built in the 18th and early 19th centuries will today be filled with much taller houses, after being remodelled to add extra floors during the Victorian period.

Piano Nobile - meaning Noble Floor in Italian, this was the principal floor with the main reception rooms, used for entertaining guests. In a London townhouse, the piano nobile would have been the first floor. In large country houses, the piano nobile might be on either the ground floor or the first floor, depending on the age and design of the house.

Windows

"Jones's Mansion, the only ancient edifice that remains at present to be noticed, stands at the corner of Ox Lane, leading to St Alkmund's. It is in various styles of architecture, exhibiting the square mullioned window of James the First's days, as well as the wide gable and clumsy sash of Charles the Second's time."
[The beauties of England and Wales: or, Delineations, topographical, historical, and descriptive, of each county, Volume 18, Part 1, pub. 1813]

By the beginning of the 19th century, various styles of windows had already come into or gone out of fashion, depending on the era when the properties were built.

Bay Windows were windows that projected out from the main wall of a building. You might have a square bay, made up of three or four casement or sash windows, arranged in a half-rectangle, or an angled bay. The wall beneath it mirrored the shape of the window, so you could walk into or sit in the bay. A bay window may be on the ground floor only, or replicate the shape of the bay in the rooms immediately above. Square bay windows were common in Elizabethan properties, and the angular style bays were occasionally built on Georgian properties, but bay windows didn't become really popular again until the 1870s.