page_title: Semi-detached
section_title: Outside the United Kingdom and Ireland
hierarchical_section_title: Semi-detached / Outside the United Kingdom and Ireland
caption_attribution_description: English: Houses (late 19th-cen.) on Mount Pleasant Avenue, Northwest Philadelphia. January 2018.
context_page_description: A semi-detached house is a single family duplex dwelling house that shares one common wall with the next house. The name distinguishes this style of house from detached houses, with no shared walls, and terraced houses, with a shared wall on both sides. Often, semi-detached houses are built as pairs in which each house's layout is a mirror image of the other's.
  Semi-detached houses are the most common property type in the United Kingdom. They accounted for 32% of UK housing transactions and 32% of the English housing stock in 2008. Between 1945 and 1964, 41% of all properties built were semis. After 1980, the proportion of semis built fell to 15%.
context_section_description: Although semi-detached housing is built throughout the world, it is generally seen as particularly symbolic of the suburbanisation of the United Kingdom and Ireland, or post-war homes in Canada. In Toronto, the semi-detached house was a major building type during both the pre and post-war periods. In New England, some other parts of the United States, and occasionally in Canada, this style is colloquially called a "duplex". Elsewhere, however, "duplex" refers to a building comprising two flats/apartments, one above the other; this is also referred to as a "two-flat'. Semi-detached houses are typically referred to as 'twins' in the Mid-Atlantic region (particularly in Pennsylvania).
caption: Semi-detached houses ("twins") in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
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