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accommodation, or housing, among other meanings.
The social unit that lives in a house is known as a household. Most commonly, a household is a family unit of some kind, though households can be
other social groups, such as single persons, or groups of unrelated individuals. Settled agrarian and industrial societies are composed of household units living permanently in housing of various types,
according to a variety of forms of land tenure. English-speaking people generally call any building they routinely occupy "home". Many people leave their houses during the day for work and
recreation, and return to them to sleep or for other activities.
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concrete), structural insulated panels (foam panels faced with oriented strand board or fiber cement), and light-gauge steel framing and heavy-gauge steel framing
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More generally, people often build houses out of the nearest available material, and often tradition and/or culture govern construction-materials, so whole towns, areas, counties or even states/countries
may be built out of one main type of material. For example, a large fraction of American houses use wood, while most British and many European houses utilize stone or brick.
In the 1900s, some
house designers started using prefabrication. Sears, Roebuck & Co. first marketed their Sears Catalog Homes to the general public in 1908. Prefab techniques became popular after World War II. First
small inside rooms framing, then later, whole walls were prefabricated and carried to the construction site. The original impetus was to use the labor force inside a shelter during inclement weather.
More recently builders have begun to collaborate with structural engineers who use computers and finite element analysis to design prefabricated steel-framed homes with known resistance to high
wind-loads and seismic forces. These newer products provide labor savings, more consistent quality, and possibly accelerated construction processes.
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Structure
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The developed world in general features three basic types of house that have their own ground-level entry and private open space, and usually on a separately titled parcel of land:
Single-family detached houses – free-standing on all sides.
Semi-detached houses (duplexes) – houses that are attached, usually to only one other house via a party wall.
Terraced house (UK), also
known as a row house or townhouse – attached to other houses, possibly in a row, each separated by a party wall.
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In addition, there are various forms of attached housing where a number of dwelling units are co-located within the same structure, which share a ground-level entry and may or may not have any private open space,
such as apartments (a.k.a. flats) of various scales. Another type of housing is movable, such as houseboats, caravans, and trailer homes.
In the United Kingdom, 27% of the population live in terraced houses
and 32% in semi-detached houses, as of 2002. In the United States as of 2000, 61.4% of people live in detached houses and 5.6% in semi-detached houses, 26% in row houses or apartments, and 7% in mobile homes.
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dacha. Compare the popularity of the holiday house or cottage, also known as a crib.
In contrast to a relatively upper class or modern trend to ownership of multiple houses, much of human history shows the
importance of multi-purpose houses. Thus the house long served as the traditional place of work (the original cottage industry site or "in-house" small-scale manufacturing workshop) or of commerce
(featuring, for example, a ground floor "shop-front" shop or counter or office, with living space above). During the Industrial Revolution there was a separation of manufacturing and banking from the
house, though to this day some shopkeepers continue (or have returned) to live "over the shop".
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