Other people's houses

One type of "imagined interior" is of course the house - they are everywhere, in such variety, and have many clues that lead you to speculate about their owners and their history. Quite apart from the nosiness factor - and/or the fascination of looking into lighted rooms (which are usually empty) - lighted rooms that reflect themselves in the windows, so someone outside is invisible.

My personal history consists of about 20 domestic spaces, and I've been "my very own little flat" for some 15 years. Where you live is so important ... and so is where you'd rather be living! A turret room ... the south of France ... the middle of the city ... away from it all - usually it's the environment you choose; your personal environment seems to come with you - how you live is as hard to change as your basic personality. (And many of us struggle.)

But I digress. As an 11-year-old, in a house that was still being built even as we lived in it, I envied Ella's tidy split-level in a new subdivision, which looked a bit like this, except for having a deck on one side -

but even more I loved to go to Judy's big old farmhouse, after school. It had two stories, a basement, an attic (!), a verandah all the way round, a big central staircase,a piano, and willow trees in the front yard. You went in to a kitchen with a wood stove for cooking, and there was a couch where her dad read the newspaper after coming in from the barn, which was on the other side of the railway. It was built in the 1920s, but in the early 1960s they "modernised" it, taking the top off and adding bedrooms out the side. Now, it's gone; the railway yards have expanded. Its plan was something like this one:
While looking for house plans I found this overview of history of housing in America, an online book on various "ordinary" houses in Australia, and a link to the tiny-house movement. The smallest "real" house seems to be 900 square feet - big enough for a small family -
The most important source of my love for house plans is my father, who was building our house, bit by bit -- and when that house burnt down in 1973, built another - and then finally built a "retirement house" on the same property, where the family has lived for over 50 years. We had plenty of house-plan magazines and I loved to imagine what it would be like to live in those houses, and to draw plans of my own ideal houses.

This has led to fantasies, while in "interesting" meeting rooms or other spaces, of converting them into places to live - bed lofts under high ceilings, or murphy beds when space is tight ... and just how small can the kitchen be ...