Hall house

The hall house is a type of vernacular house traditional in many parts of England, Wales, and lowland Scotland, as well as northern Europe, during the Middle Ages, centring on a hall. Usually timber-framed, some high status examples were built in stone.

Unaltered hall houses are almost unknown. Where they have survived, they have almost always been significantly changed and extended by successive owners over the generations.

Origins

In Old English, a "hall" is simply a large room enclosed by a roof and walls, and in Anglo-Saxon England simple one-room buildings, with a single hearth in the middle of the floor for cooking and warmth, were the usual residence of a lord of the manor and his retainers. The whole community was used to eating and sleeping in the hall. This is the hall as Beowulf understood it. Over several centuries the hall developed into a building which provided more than one room, giving some privacy to its more important residents.

A significant house needs both public and private areas. The public area is the place for living: cooking, eating, meeting and playing, while private space is for withdrawing and for storing valuables. A source of heat is required, and in northern latitudes walls are also needed to keep the weather out and to keep in the heat. By about 1400, in lowland Britain, with changes in settlement patterns and agriculture, people were thinking of houses as permanent structures rather than temporary shelter. According to the locality, they built stone or timber-framed houses with wattle and daub or clay infill. The designs were copied by their neighbours and descendants in the tradition of vernacular architecture. They were sturdy and some have survived over five hundred years. Hall houses built after 1570 are rare.

Hall House

Hall House or Hall Farm may refer to:
(sorted by state, then city/town)

Hall House (Bethel, Maine)

The Hall House is a historic house at 10 Kilborn Street in Bethel, Maine. Built in 1910 by Dana and Alfaretta Hall, this house is a rare and distinctive local example of Craftsman style, especially in consideration of its setting in a small Maine town. Although it is predominantly Craftsman in style, it structurally harkens to the traditional connected farmsteads of rural New England. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.

Description and history

Little is known about the Hall family and their reasons for building this house. Apparently it was built to serve as either a retirement home or as an "in-town" house for the Halls, who were known to farm elsewhere in the county. The house was built over a three-month period in the summer of 1910.

The house is a wood frame structure 1-1/2 stories in height, clad in shingles, with a hipped standing seam metal roof, and resting on a foundation of stone and stone-faced concrete. The main block of the house is connected to a similarly-styled carriage house via a single-story hyphen which is fronted by a porch, reminiscent of typical New England connected farmsteads. Its main (south-facing) facade is three bays wide, with a slightly-projecting tower-like section in the right bay, which has its own low-pitch pyramidal roof, The center section has a sash window, and the left bay has a recessed porch providing access to the entrance. A hip-roof dormer projects from the roof above the main facade. A porch on the east side wraps around to the north side of the house, separated from the tower projection by a fieldstone chimney. A rectangular projection intrudes on the porch, topped by a gable dormer.