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A townhouse, townhome, town house, or town home is a type of Terraced house. A modern townhouse is often one with multiple floors on a small footprint. In older British usage, the term originally referred to any type of city residence (normally in London) of someone whose main or largest residence was a country house.
Townhouses are expensive where detached single-family houses are uncommon, such as in New York City, Philadelphia, Montreal, and San Francisco. A brownstone townhouse is a particular variety found in New York.
Rowhouses are similar and consist of several adjacent, uniform units. Originally they were located in older, pre-automobile urban areas such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New Orleans; however, they are now found in lower-cost suburban housing developments as well. A rowhouse typically has a continuous roof and foundation with a single wall dividing adjacent townhouses, but some have a double wall with inches-wide air space in between the units, which share a common foundation. A rowhouse will generally be smaller and less luxurious than a dwelling called a townhouse.
Over time the term townhouse has come to be used to describe non-uniform living units that are designed to mimic a detached home. The distinction between living units called apartments and those called townhouses is that a townhouse usually consists of multiple floors and has its own outside door as opposed to being on only one floor and/or having access via either an interior hallway or an exterior balcony-style walkway. Another distinction is that in most areas of the United States outside of the very largest cities, apartment refers to rental housing, while townhouse typically refers to an individually owned dwelling, with no other unit beneath or above. However, the term townhouse-style apartment is sometimes used for bi-level rental apartments.
Townhouses can also be "stacked". Such homes have multiple units vertically (typically two), normally each with its own private entrance from the street or at least from the outside. They can be side by side in a row of three or more, in which case they are sometimes referred to as rowhouses. A townhouse in a group of two could be referred to as a townhouse, but in Canada and the United States, it is typically called a semi-detached home, a duplex, or in some areas of western Canada, a half-duplex.
In Canada, single-family dwellings of any type (e.g., detached homes, apartments, mobile homes, or townhouses) are split into two categories of ownership:
Condominium townhouses, just like condominium apartments, are often referred to as condos, thus referring to the type of ownership rather than to the type of dwelling. Since apartment-style condos are the most common, when someone refers to a condo, many erroneously assume that it must be an apartment-style dwelling and that only apartment-style dwellings can be condos. All types of dwellings can be condos, and this is therefore true of townhouses.
In population-dense Asian cities dominated by high-rise residential apartment blocks, such as Hong Kong, townhouses in private housing developments remain almost exclusively populated by the very wealthy due to the rarity and relatively large sizes of the units. Prominent examples in Hong Kong include Severn 8, in which a townhouse sold for HK$285 million (US$37 million) in 2008, or HK$57,000 (US$7,400) per square foot, a record in Asia, and The Beverly Hills, which consists of multiple rows of townhouses with some units as large as . Commonly in the suburbs of major cities, an old house on a large block of land is demolished and replaced by a short row of townhouses, built 'end on' to the street for added privacy.
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