Apartment

In Malaysian English, flat often denotes a housing block of two rooms with walk-up, no lift, without facilities, typically five stories tall, and with outdoor parking space,[6] while apartment is more generic and may also include luxury condominiums.

Danchi is the Japanese word for a large cluster of apartment buildings of a particular style and design, typically built as public housing by government authorities.

A bedsit is not self-contained and so is not an apartment or flat as this article uses the terms; it forms part of what the UK government calls a house in multiple occupation.

The large Georgian or Victorian townhouse was built with an excavated subterranean space around its front known as an area, often surrounded by cast iron railings.

When part of a house is converted for the ostensible use of the owner's family member, the self-contained dwelling may be known as an "in-law apartment", "annexe", or "granny flat", though these (sometimes illegally) created units are often occupied by ordinary renters rather than the landlord's relative.

[14] Maisonette (a corruption of maisonnette, French for "little house" and originally the spelling in English as well, but it has since fallen into disuse) has no strict definition, but the OED suggests "a part of a residential building which is occupied separately, usually on more than one floor and having its own outside entrance."

These loft apartments were usually located in former high-rise warehouses and factories left vacant after town planning rules and economic conditions in the mid 20th century changed.

A typical arrangement is a cluster of five or so room-apartments with a common kitchen and bathroom and separate front doors, occupying a floor in a pre-Revolutionary mansion.

Like guests semi-permanently installed in a luxury hotel, residents could enjoy the additional facilities such as house keeping, laundry, catering and other services if and when desired.

a number of hotels have supplemented their traditional business model with serviced apartment wings, creating privately owned areas within their buildings - either freehold or leasehold.

[citation needed] On or around the ground floor of the apartment building, a series of mailboxes are typically kept in a location accessible to the public and, thus, to the mail carrier.

Depending on the building design, the entrance doors may be connected directly to the outside or to a common area inside, such as a hallway or a lobby.

[26] During the medieval Arabic-Islamic period, the Egyptian capital of Fustat (Old Cairo) housed many high-rise residential buildings, some seven stories tall that could reportedly accommodate hundreds of people.

In the 10th century, Al-Muqaddasi described them as resembling minarets,[27] and stated that the majority of Fustat's population lived in these multi-story apartment buildings, each one housing more than 200 people.

[27] By the 16th century, the current Cairo also had high-rise apartment buildings, in which the two lower floors were for commercial and storage purposes and the multiple stories above them were rented out to tenants.

[33] The Hakka people in southern China adopted communal living structures designed to be easily defensible, in the form of Weilongwu (围龙屋) and Tulou (土楼).

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the concept of the flat was slow to catch on amongst the British middle classes, which generally followed the north European standard of single-family houses dating far back into history.

Both urban growth and the increase in population meant that more imaginative housing concepts would be needed if the middle and upper classes were to maintain a pied-à-terre in the capital.

Tenements today are bought by a wide range of social types, including young professionals, older retirees, and by absentee landlords, often for rental to students after they leave halls of residence managed by their institution.

These proved too expensive, so a modern tenement, three stories high, slate roofed and built of reconstituted stone, was re-introduced and a slum clearance programme initiated to clear areas such as the Calton and the Garngad.

In 1970, a team from Strathclyde University demonstrated that the old tenements had been basically sound, and could be given new life with replumbing providing modern kitchens and bathrooms.

Many of Glasgow's worst tenements were refurbished into desirable accommodation in the 1970s and 1980s[37] and the policy of demolition is considered to have destroyed fine examples of a "universally admired architectural" style.

"Old Dan" made a big fortune—he told me once four hundred thousand dollars—out of his alley and the surrounding tenements, only to grow blind himself in extreme old age, sharing in the end the chief hardship of the wretched beings whose lot he had stubbornly refused to better that he might increase his wealth.

Even when the Board of Health at last compelled him to repair and clean up the worst of the old buildings, under threat of driving out the tenants and locking the doors behind them, the work was accomplished against the old man's angry protests.

In spite of the genuine anguish of the appeal, it was downright amusing to find that his anger was provoked less by the anticipated waste of luxury on his tenants than by distrust of his own kind, the builder.

In the United States, "tenement" is a label usually applied to the less expensive, more basic rental apartment buildings in older sections of large cities.

[42] Apartment buildings in Australia are typically managed by a body corporate in which owners pay a monthly fee to provide for maintenance of common premises.

As a continuation of the gentrification of the inner city, a fashion became New York "loft" style apartments (see above) and a large stock of old warehouses and old abandoned office buildings in and around the central business district became the target of developers.

Similar warehouse conversions and gentrification began in Brisbane suburbs such as Teneriffe, Queensland and Fortitude Valley and in Sydney in areas such as Ultimo.

Despite their size, other smaller cities including Canberra, Darwin, Townsville, Cairns, Newcastle, Wollongong, Adelaide and Geelong have begun building apartments in the 2000s.