Charleston house

Charleston house

An 18th- or early-19th-century town house in Charleston, South Carolina; usually Georgian or Greek Revival style, two stories high, with the first story often well above ground level. Such houses were of two types. The first and more common type, called a single house, was long and narrow, a single room deep, built with its long side perpendicular to the street; on the long side facing a garden was a two-tiered colonnaded porch onto which all rooms opened; the entrance was by a flight of stairs leading from the street up to the porch. The second type, called a double house, had a façade facing the street and was two rooms deep, boxlike in shape, and had a portico with a classical two-tiered porch in the middle of the façade.