new guy on the block with a question

[Don M]

It's not at all unusual to have to walk thru one room to get to another in older homes of the era. It saves wasted space for hallways & allow better air circulation during hot summer days. Our 1830s stone farmhouse does have hallways but all rooms are also connected to each other by connecting doors.

[hvychevy (WavyGlass)]

ok good to know don this house does not have any hall ways at all .

[clover]

A friend has been trying to sell her house for 3 years. It has 3 bedrooms, but you have to walk through the second one to get to the third. She was single when she bought it, and didn't think much of it. Now she's discovered that families are none too pleased with that set up. She gets lots of showings, but the connected bedrooms scare them away.

[Texas_Ranger]

Long ago I nosed around in an abandoned rural house in Italy (very odd beast, a huge 3-storey affair in a tiny village with no more than 5 or 6 houses, all the others two-storey bank houses) and the main apartment was just one endless circle of rooms with two front doors! Unfortunately I have very few pictures of that place but the layout has always puzzled me!

I suppose by now it'll have collapsed. The last time I've been there in 2002 one of the gable walls had started to tumble down and once those stone walls crumble it's over.

[SouthernLady]

My grandparents' 1790s home did not have a single hallway, either. I never thought it unusual as a kid, but then again my family were all raised Northwestern NC rural (foothills/VA line) and all the houses were old as dirt so we all didn't really know any different. I remember walking in the original room, through the door to the bedroom, through another bedroom, and then the kitchen. The first bedroom had the only access to the loft--a rickety ladder that went through a hole in the ceiling. At some point after the Civil War it was enclosed by a closet with a peg lock handle.

Gosh, I miss that house...