When is a flat not a flat?

The blocks around here are known as apartments, but the Victorian terraced properties with one property upstairs and one down, are still known as Tyneside Flats (Tyneside apartments would just be weird!!!)

Go and live on a sink estate then.

Is that meant to be nasty or am I misinterpreting it as it's only text and I can't use intonation or body language to gauge intention?

Just worked it out. We live in a quasi semi, Queen Anne period peasant's cottage, with a bijoux walled garden. lol

Go and live on a sink estate then.

In this town there are lots of retirement properties. The social housing blocks are flats whilst the privately owned are apartments. I agree with Rosina...it's the Hyacinth Bucket effect . A lot of the social housing flats are bigger than the privately owned apartments.

The vast majority of new flats being built these days,
seem to be called luxury apartments! Hmmm!!

I always understood that a maisonette was literally 'a small house'; at one point I lived in a property in a block, and my home had a front door onto the street (as opposed to inside a communal area) and was two story. However, having been involved in the selling of what I would consider a purpose built flat recently it seems that even a one story property, in a block, is called a maisonette if it has a front door opening directly onto the street. A flat is within a block with an 'inside' front door leading from a communal area. An apartment is a flat trying to sound grand - the 'Hyacinth Bucket' effect!

We have a row of terraced houses opposite us. One is on the market as a 2 bed cottage !

When the ex and I first got married we rented a small bungalow, which was rather grandly referred to by our landlady as the 'garden flat'.

Well i lived in a bedsitter when I first left home. Would that be an apartment now?

It would be a "studio apartment" and would probably be at least twice the size of most of the studios on the market nowadays, in fact it has probably been redeveloped/divided up into 3 executive capsule living modern studio apartments!

Well i lived in a bedsitter when I first left home. Would that be an apartment now?
It looks very nice merlotgran

Wish I knew what to call our granny pad. DH keeps calling it a flat even if I'm glaring at him and stamping on his toes because it isn't!. We converted a building that had once been our catering/production kitchen so it's always been know as The Kitchen.

I toyed with the idea of something grand like Garden Lodge as it sits in a large cottage garden but DH thinks Nettle Cabin would be more appropriate.

We still refer to our old home at the other end of the garden as The Bungalow.

Our postman just calls it The Annexe.

He's right really.

I think in England an apartment has to be completely self contained - it's own seperate services (gas, water, heat, electric - each billed separately to individual apartments)

But a flat has to be a flat and not an apartment if it shares some services. Like if you converted a house into two "flats" that use the same boiler or something, they cannot be "apartments"

However I think it's different in america because NY style "apartments" often have communal services.

I don't know where I plucked all that from, I'm pretty sure I read that from a reliable source somewhere at some point LOL :-D

Vampirequeen, well said!

We live in a single storey dwelling apparently, aka a bungalow.

granjura A condo is where each person owns their own area with a communal space to the building. An apartment is rented/leased from the buildings free holder.
I didn't know the difference until I Googled.

One of my neighbours gets very cross with me if I refer to my walled courtyard as just a yard or worse still a back yard. Apparently we don't have such 'common' (her words) things around here.

It's classed as a cottage because it was built for farm labourers. It seems that factory workers lived in houses but farm workers lived in cottages even though they look exactly the same to me lol.

The snobbery in this town amuses but also annoys me. I come from the nearby city and the way some people talk about it, it's a cross between Sodom and Gomorrah . It's actually a normal big city with lots of nice bits and a few not so nice bits.

Well I'm leaving my cottage and probably moving to an apartment because we're dead posh round 'ere.
I'd rather have a flat if they're cheaper though.

Very fond of it really even if it is smaller than an apartment?

My house is now a "cottage" I think it is still a hovel or rabbit hutch ??

Well where live they are all called 'appartements' - so apartment sounds ok to me ;)... In the USA, don't they say 'condo' - that's what my relatives call flats there.

It's nothing new.
We bought our first house, a two up two down end-terrace in north Manchester which the estate agent was pleased to describe as a 'quasi-semi'.
Presumably in 1970 they had not yet thought of 'Victorian artisan's cottage'

According to the HUH presenter Martin a maisonette is a flat with it's own external door.
I think of apartments as London wearhouse conversions or part of purpose built riverside buildings.
The one that confuses me is as vq says. Calling a small Victorian terrace house a cottage.

Its flat in the UK and apartment in the USA or Europe at least that's how I see it. Then there is always Maisonette I wonder what the estate agents market that as nowadays.

vampirequeen