Of Bungalows and Flats

Now that I'm on my way back to India, this seems to be a good time to finally post some architectural thoughts I've been working on for some time…

I was curious about the term "bungalow". In India it's pretty much any detached "single family" home -- remembering that in India, "family" is multi-generational. The size ranges from a modest cottage to a huge mansion, but given real estate prices in India, a bungalow of any sort is upper-class.

Bungalows in an up-scale neighborhood in Vapi.

A bungalow can be very large and impressive.

This is the bungalow we're renting for our stay in Vapi.

In the U.S., a "bungalow" is a modest middle-class house and has a particular architectural meaning, which varies with location. Chicago, Minneapolis, and Seattle have distinctive differences in "bungalows". Interestingly, the word is borrowed from India -- meaning "Bengali" architecture via the Hindi and Gujarati languages. (Thank you, Wikipedia. Give them a donation. It's a great resource -- and an almost all-volunteer organization.)

I'm mostly familiar with the Chicago bungalow -- a between-the-wars brick house with five rooms (living room, dining room, kitchen, 2 bedrooms, bath) on the first floor (about 1000 sq ft), and a bedroom or two tucked into the originally unfinished attic. It usually has a full basement and a front porch/stoop. The really nice ones have a "octagon front", and feature arts-and-crafts style windows. It's long and narrow to fit on a typical Chicago lot, with a 2-car garage in the rear of the lot accessible from the alley.

A typical Chicago bungalow (in Skokie, a near-in suburb just north of Chicago).
Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ASummer_2006_0882.jpg
Attribution: Silverstone1 at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

Which brings me around to "flats". In India, an apartment is a "flat". Although in the U.S. "apartment" is the more common usage, "flat" has a specific connotation in Chicago -- an apartment that occupies an entire floor of a building that usually has two or three floors plus a basement -- hence two-flats and three-flats. The Chicago two-flat is typically of the same vintage as the bungalow, and has the same floor plan, just repeated on the second (and possibly third) floor. Same lot size and same two-car garage in the back.

The two-flat I grew up in on the northwest side of Chicago. My paternal grandparents occupied the top flat. It's mostly unchanged: We did not have the wrought-iron fence or the storm door, and the basement windows were wood-frame, not glass brick. (The wooden front door replaced the original one with large glass panels when my bicycle went through the glass on its way up from storage in the basement.)

Two-flats and bungalows continued to be built through 50s and 60s, but they have a different external style, and the 60s bungalows lack the spacious attic.