# Sub-divided mansions

By [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com) · 2023-11-26

apartment-building, architecture, bloomberg-citylab, condominium-building, housing, london, london-housing, mansion-flat, multi-family-housing, terrace-house

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![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/3e64793c845145d6b4774c1bcd463178.jpg)

In the second half of the 19th century, the way Londoners had historically lived, [started to change](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-11-20/the-design-history-of-london-s-mansion-block-apartment-buildings):

> _In the 1870s, a striking change was occurring in the residential habits of London’s elite. After centuries of living close to the ground in houses,_ [_Charles Dickens Jr._](https://www.victorianlondon.org/houses/flats.htm) _(son of the famous writer) observed that wealthy residents were starting “to avail themselves of the continental experience … and to adopt the foreign fashion of living in flats.”_

The resulting housing typology was something known as the mansion block. And as the name suggests, one of the principal design ideas was that these blocks should, ideally, look like a single giant mansion. In other words, the individual homes were [to be obfuscated](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-11-20/the-design-history-of-london-s-mansion-block-apartment-buildings):

> _The mansion block was a grand building that borrowed elements of the English terraced house (as a row house is known in British English), particularly the elite “_[_palace fronted_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelphi,_London#/media/File:View_of_the_south_front_of_the_new_buildings_called_Adelphi_RP-P-OB-70.899.jpg)_” terraced houses designed by Scottish architect_ [_Robert Adam_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adam) _and his brothers a century earlier, which concealed individual houses behind a grand facade to resemble a single palatial structure._

It is a design approach that makes sense. I mean, I can see wealthy people wanting to appear as if they're living in a palatial mansion. That said, it is an approach to multi-family housing that feels somewhat foreign today. Most people don't look up at tall buildings and wonder if it's one person's home.

And we don't aim for that.

Presumably this is, at least partially, because scales grew, builders were looking for economies of scale, and because modernism told us that mansion-looking structures were outdated. Whatever the reasons, multi-family buildings today are not generally conceived of as sub-divided mansions.

What's maybe ironic about this shift, though, is that we went from elaborate and varied facade designs intended to communicate _single_ structures, to modern and repetitive facade designs that, somehow, better communicate the _individual_ homes.

I suppose we got used to the "foreign fashion of living in flats".

_Image: Josh Kramer for_ [_Bloomberg CityLab_](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-11-20/the-design-history-of-london-s-mansion-block-apartment-buildings)

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*Originally published on [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com/sub-divided-mansions)*