"Mixed-use buildings" combine commercial and residential uses within the same structure. Typically, mixed-use buildings consist of businesses on the lower floors (often retail in street-facing ground floor and supporting subterranean levels) and residential apartments on the upper floors.
In the United States, some apartment-dwellers own their units, either as a housing cooperative, in which the residents own shares of a corporation that owns the building or development; or in a condominium, whose residents own their apartments and share ownership of the public spaces. Most apartments are in buildings designed for the purpose, but large older houses are sometimes divided into apartments. The word apartment denotes a residential unit or section in a building. In some locations, particularly the United States, the word connotes a rental unit owned by the building owner, and is not typically used for a condominium.
Apartment buildings are multi-story buildings where three or more residences are contained within one structure. Such a building may be called an apartment building, apartment complex, flat complex, block of flats, tower block, high-rise or, occasionally, mansion block (in British English), especially if it consists of many apartments for rent. A high-rise apartment building is commonly referred to as a residential tower, apartment tower, or block of flats in Australia.
In American English, the distinction between rental apartments and condominiums is that while rental buildings are owned by a single entity and rented out to many, condominiums are owned individually, while their owners still pay a monthly or yearly fee for building upkeep. Condominiums are often leased by their owner as rental apartments. A third alternative, the cooperative apartment building (or "co-op"), acts as a corporation with all of the tenants as shareholders of the building. Tenants in cooperative buildings do not own their apartment, but instead own a proportional number of shares of the entire cooperative. As in condominiums, cooperators pay a monthly fee for building upkeep. Co-ops are common in cities such as New York, and have gained some popularity in other larger urban areas in the U.S.
In British English the usual word is "flat", but apartment is used by property developers to denote expensive 'flats' in exclusive and expensive residential areas in, for example, parts of London such as Belgravia and Hampstead. In Scotland, it is called a block of flats or, if it is a traditional sandstone building, a tenement, a term which has a negative connotation elsewhere.
Australian English and New Zealand English traditionally used the term flat (although it also applies to any rental property), and more recently also use the terms unit or apartment. In Australia, a 'unit' refers to flats, apartments or even semi-detached houses. In Australia, the terms "unit", "flat" and "apartment" are largely used interchangeably. Newer high-rise buildings are more often marketed as "apartments", as the term "flats" carries colloquial connotations. The term condominium or condo is rarely used in Australia despite attempts by developers to market it.
In Malaysian English, flat often denotes a housing block of two rooms with walk-up, no lift, without facilities, typically five storeys tall, and with outdoor parking space,[6] while apartment is more generic and may also include luxury condominiums.
In Japanese English loanwords (Wasei-eigo), the term apartment (apaato) is used for lower-income housing and mansion (manshon) is used for high-end apartments; but both terms refer to what English-speakers regard as an apartment. This use of the term mansion has a parallel with British English's mansion block, a term denoting prestigious apartment buildings from the Victorian and Edwardian, which usually feature an ornate facade and large, high-ceilinged flats with period features. Danchi is the Japanese word for a large cluster of apartment buildings of a particular style and design, typically built as public housing by government authorities. See Housing in Japan.
The smallest self-contained apartments are referred to as studio, efficiency or bachelor apartments in the US and Canada, or studio flat in the UK. These units usually consist of a large single main room which acts as the living room, dining room and bedroom combined and usually also includes kitchen facilities, with a separate bathroom. In Korea, the term "one room" (wonroom) refers to a studio apartment.[7]
A bedsit is a UK variant on single room accommodation: a bed-sitting room, probably without cooking facilities, with a shared bathroom. A bedsit is not self-contained and so is not an apartment or flat as this article uses the terms; it forms part of what the UK government calls a house in multiple occupation.[8]
Merriam-Webster defines a garden apartment in American English as "a multiple-unit low-rise dwelling having considerable lawn or garden space."[9] The apartment buildings are often arranged around courtyards that are open at one end. Such a garden apartment shares some characteristics of a townhouse: each apartment has its own building entrance, or shares that entrance via a staircase and lobby that adjoins other units immediately above and/or below it. Unlike a townhouse, each apartment occupies only one level. Such garden apartment buildings are almost never more than three stories high, since they typically lack elevators. However, the first "garden apartment" buildings in New York, USA, built in the early 1900s, were constructed five stories high.[10][11] Some garden apartment buildings place a one-car garage under each apartment. The interior grounds are often landscaped.
A unit in the attic of a building and usually converted from domestic servants' quarters. These apartments are characterized by their sloping walls, which can restrict the usable space; the resultant stair climb in buildings that do not have elevators and the sloping walls can make garret apartments less desirable than units on lower floors. However, because these apartments are located on the top floors of their buildings, they can offer the best views and are quieter because of the lack of upstairs neighbours.
When part of a house is converted for the ostensible use of the owner's family member, the self-contained dwelling may be known as an "in-law apartment", "annexe", or "granny flat", though these (sometimes illegally) created units are often occupied by ordinary renters rather than the landlord's relative. In Canada these are commonly located below the main house and are therefore "basement suites".[citation needed] Another term is an "accessory dwelling unit", which may be part of the main house, or a free-standing structure in its grounds.
Salon apartment is a term linked to the exclusive apartments built as part of multi-family houses in Belgrade and in certain towns in Yugoslavia in the first decades of the 20th century.[12] The structure of the apartments included centrally located anteroom with a combined function of the dining room and one or more salon areas. Most of these apartments were built in Belgrade (Serbia), along with the first examples of apartments popularly named 'salon apartments', with the concept of spatial and functional organization later spreading to other larger urban centers in Yugoslavia.[13]
Maisonette (a corruption of maisonnette, French for "little house" and originally the spelling in English as well, but which has since fallen into disuse) has no strict definition, but the OED suggests "a part of a residential building which is occupied separately, usually on more than one floor and having its own outside entrance." It differs from a flat in having, usually, more than one floor, with a staircase internal to the dwelling leading from the entrance floor to the upper (or, in some cases, lower) other floor. This is a very common arrangement in much post-war British housing (especially, but not exclusively, public housing) serving both to reduce costs by reducing the amount of space given to access corridors and to emulate the 'traditional' two-storey terrace house to which many of the residents would have been accustomed. It also allows for apartments, even when accessed by a corridor, to have windows on both sides of the building.
The vast majority of apartments are on one level, hence "flat". Some, however, have two storeys, joined internally by stairs, just as many houses do. One term for this is "maisonette", as above. Some housing in the United Kingdom, both public and private, was designed as scissor section flats. On a grander level, penthouses may have more than one storey, to emphasise the idea of space and luxury. Two storey units in new construction are sometimes referred to as "townhouses" in some countries (though not usually in Britain).
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