Excerpt from The Making of Home by Judith Flanders, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

There is always an inherent anachronism in how the great majority of the population experiences housing. For most of history, at the top of the social scale people lived, or wanted to live, in houses that were newly constructed. It was only in the past century that having an old house generally came to be accepted as a status symbol for the rich. Previously, among those who could afford it, each generation frequently razed and rebuilt their houses in the style of the day. Otherwise, living in an older building has always been, and continues to be, the norm. Most people living in London in the first half of the nineteenth century, for example, lived in eighteenth- or even seventeenth-century housing, just as millions of twenty-first-century Britons live in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century houses, or millions of New Yorkers live in apartment buildings that date from around World War II.

If few people lived in new and fashionable houses, even fewer lived in houses designed by architects. There is an important distinction to be made between architecture, buildings designed by architects, and housing, buildings built by builders, or by their residents. At most, 5 per cent of the world's housing standing today is architect-designed. (Some think it might be even less, possibly less than 1 per cent.) Those people who do employ an architect for their housing have historically been, almost without exception, the wealthy and privileged, who use buildings to make statements, express power or hierarchy, or reinforce the status quo. Yet these buildings have always been a tiny minority of what was constructed, and lived in. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the aristocracy in Britain, the architect-employing class, consisted of 350 families in a population of 18 million. Only for a few decades in the twentieth century did architects in any number design extensively for the working classes, producing social housing after both world wars. Instead, from the late seventeenth century in the British Isles, from the nineteenth century in the USA, Germany and the Netherlands, most housing was produced by speculative builders, a market-driven approach that meant houses were built for people whose tastes the builder did not know. The results were therefore routinely conservative in style, literally reconstructions of houses that had already proved popular.

Just as we need to be wary about assuming that the people of any one period all lived in houses dating from that time, so too caution is required in assessing the size of houses of the past from what has survived. Most of the population in most areas lived in housing not any larger than the 'kennel' that so shocked the geologists in Siberia. Many of what today are frequently described as old workers' cottages were originally farmhouses of the comfortably-off, or even small manor houses. As well-to-do yeomen farmers built themselves larger houses in newer styles, the older houses were handed down to their workers, inadvertently giving later ages the notion that these houses had been what the working poor had been accustomed to. In England, this was exacerbated by what historians call the Great Rebuilding, a country-wide wave of construction that began in the southeast in the mid-sixteenth century, propelled by, among other things, relative political stability, a thriving economy and new technologies that enabled increased brick-manufacture and fireplaces that were re-sited from the centre of the room to its walls. From the late sixteenth to the seventeenth century, many of the vernacular buildings in England were rebuilt completely, many more were altered to a lesser degree, and more were entirely new. The Great Rebuilding began with upper-class housing, but by the early eighteenth century it had spread to those with less money.

Excerpted from The Making of Home by Judith Flanders. Copyright © 2015 by Judith Flanders. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.