page_title: Apartment
section_title: Small buildings with a few one-storey dwellings
hierarchical_section_title: Apartment / Types and characteristics / Small buildings with a few one-storey dwellings
caption_attribution_description: English: Example of a 1950s "dingbat" apartment facade. Carports in the shadowed "crawl space" below facade's features. Dingbat located just south of Wilshire Boulevard; on 12th Street, on the west-right side — in Santa Monica, Southern California.
context_page_description: An apartment, or flat, is a self-contained housing unit that occupies only part of a building, generally on a single storey. There are many names for these overall buildings, see below. The housing tenure of apartments also varies considerably, from large-scale public housing, to owner occupancy within what is legally a condominium, to tenants renting from a private landlord.
context_section_description: "Duplex" refers to two separate units with a common demising wall or floor-ceiling assembly.
  Duplex description can be different depending on the part of the US, but generally has two to four dwellings with a door for each and usually two front doors close together but separate—referred to as 'duplex', indicating the number of units, not the number of floors, as in some areas of the country they are often only one story. Groups of more than two units have corresponding names (Triplex, etc.). Those buildings that have a third storey are known as triplexes. See Three-decker (house)
  In the United States, regional forms have developed, see vernacular architecture. In Milwaukee, a Polish flat or "raised cottage" is an existing small house that has been lifted up to accommodate the creation of a basement floor housing a separate apartment, then set down again, thus becoming a modest pair of dwellings. In the Sun Belt, boxy small apartment buildings called dingbats, often with carports below, sprang up from the 1950s.
  In the United Kingdom the term duplex is rare, but sometimes used as a modern, upmarket alternative for a maisonette. Buildings containing two dwellings with a common vertical wall are instead known as semi-detached, or colloquially a semi. This form of construction is very common, and built as such rather than a later conversion.
caption: Dingbat MaryJane
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