This is my parents’ house, in Reston, Virginia:

And so is this, in Stanton Station, New Jersey:

Oh wait, they have one more in Reston:

None of these are actually my parents’ house. But they have the same basic structure. Their home has six windows on top and four on the bottom, a side-facing garage, a little connecting room between the main structure and the garage, and a fireplace/chimney on the other side wall.

The top one here is five windows on top, front-facing garage, and no fireplace (that I can see.) The middle one is identical to my parents’ house, except these folks have turned the window in the connecting room into a second entrance. And the final house dispenses with the connecting room (and possibly with the fireplace as well).

The interior floorplans are probably similarly based on a common design with a bunch of different tweaks and adaptations. If you looked at enough of these, you’d start to be able to map them into a sort of evolutionary tree. is the five-window variant a subspecies or part of the natural variation of the main species? Etc.

I’m thinking about this because of two neat tweets about residential floorplans I saw from a fellow I follow:

This is very interesting. It’s like pulling back the curtain a little bit from something completely familiar and ubiquitous. Like seeing the DNA of a mouse. I have a book on 20th century residential floorplans that I’ll have to dig out and start reading. I might come back to this.

We often decry this kind of thing as “cookie-cutter development.” But what’s the alternative, really? For everyone to hire an architect and build a custom-designed home? You’re not going to reinvent the wheel—there are basic floorplans and structure types that are time-tested. But on the other hand, you don’t have to stamp out absolutely identical structures.

Look at cars—millions of people own a Toyota Corolla, for example, but you can customize it with color, trim, interior and exterior features, larger entertainment unit, etc. It sounds a little weird to talk about houses as “models.” “Oh, I live in the Woodlawn Colonial, it’s really nice. We went with the four-bedroom option but we passed on the second entrance, how about you?” There’s a widespread impression, I think, that homes should all be unique. But the key is not in unique structures, but in options and adaptations.

Look at the famous rowhouses of Mid-Atlantic cities. Over the decades, those streets have matured from places that looked pretty cookie-cutter at first into places that feel very much lived-in: different exterior colors and materials, lots of interior renovations and modifications, not to mention in many cases lovely street trees. And it would also be nice if we leaned into regional architectural styles.

Have you ever lived in two different buildings or units that were identical? Ever step into one and realize it was the same as yours? Leave a comment. And let me know of any books/resources about the evolution of mass-produced residential architecture. It’s really interesting stuff.

Related Reading:

Baltimore’s Lovely Cookie-Cutter Rowhouses

Ghost Buildings

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