One Room Wide (8 Photos)

Narrow Houses Squeezed Into the Street

One is about as wide as a parked car. Another is narrower than most sofas are long. They were built into alleys, gaps between neighbors and odd scraps of land, and a few of them still have people living inside.

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📏 Quay House, the Smallest House in Great Britain — Conwy, Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Painted bright red and pressed against a tower of the old town wall on Conwy quay. Wales’s heritage record gives the inside as 1.8 meters wide, 2.5 deep and 3.1 high; it was built as a fisherman’s cottage in the late 1700s or early 1800s. Two floors, and you could almost touch both walls at once.

💡 Tall Fact: The last person to live here was a local fisherman called Robert Jones, who was 6 foot 3. The house was lived in until May 1900; since then people come to look inside instead.

📷 Photo and cover crop: Suicasmo / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🏚️ The Skinny House — Boston, Massachusetts, USA 🇺🇸

Four floors of gray clapboard between two brick apartment blocks at 44 Hull Street in the North End. At only about 10 feet wide, it is the narrowest home in Boston, and it still sold for $1.25 million in 2021.

💡 Legend Fact: The famous story says one brother built it to block his brother’s sunlight. The records are duller: it is the surviving half of an old double house.

📷 Photo and cover crop: Rhododendrites / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🔨 The Skinny House — By Nathan Seely in Mamaroneck, New York, USA 🇺🇸

Red shingles, a tiny porch and a stone path on Grand Street. Builder Nathan Seely lost his business and his home in the Depression, and in 1931 his neighbor gave him a 12.5-foot strip of land for $1. Seely built a 10-foot-wide house on it.

💡 Salvage Fact: He built it from what he could find: a chicken coop became part of the living room, and a rusted railroad track serves as the center beam in the basement. The house is on the National Register of Historic Places.

📷 Photo: Anthony22 at English Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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🧱 Hollensbury Spite House — By John Hollensbury in Alexandria, Virginia, USA 🇺🇸

Seven feet of blue brick filling what used to be an alley at 523 Queen Street. Brickmaker John Hollensbury built it in 1830 beside his own house, and it is still a private home.

💡 Spite Fact: As the story goes, he was tired of carriages and loiterers using the alley, so he closed it with a house. It has 480 square feet of living space.

📷 Photo: APK / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🖊️ Keret House — By Jakub Szczęsny in Warsaw, Poland 🇵🇱

The two people below give the scale. Architect Jakub Szczęsny fitted this home into a crevice between buildings at Chłodna and Żelazna streets, just 122 centimeters across at its widest point. It opened in 2012 as a place for traveling writers, with Israeli author Etgar Keret leading the project.

💡 History Fact: This spot is where the large and small Warsaw ghettos met during the war. A bridge between them stood a few steps away.

📷 Photo: Panek / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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📚 75½ Bedford Street — New York City, USA 🇺🇸

A stepped gable on a slim red-brick front in Greenwich Village. At 9½ feet wide it is known as the narrowest house in the city, and at one point inside it tapers to 2 feet.

💡 Famous Fact: Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay lived here in 1923–24. In the 1930s, cartoonist William Steig shared it with his wife and her sister, anthropologist Margaret Mead.

📷 Photo: PortableNYCTours / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🔔 Oude Hoogstraat 22 — Amsterdam, Netherlands 🇳🇱

The glowing shop window right next to the carved stone gateway on Oude Hoogstraat. Amsterdam’s tourism board puts the front at just 2.02 meters wide, topped with a classic Amsterdam bell gable. Easy to walk past without noticing.

💡 Depth Fact: The whole house is only five meters deep, and I amsterdam lists it as the narrowest house in Europe.

📷 Photo: Shadowgate from Novara, Italy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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🌸 Kleinstes Haus — Wernigerode, Germany 🇩🇪

Flower boxes, green shutters and a front door you have to duck for on Kochstraße. Its 18th-century builders slotted it into a 2.95-meter space between two houses and saved on gable walls; the door is only 1.70 meters high.

💡 Room Fact: The upstairs living room measures 9 square meters, and the house now holds a small folk museum.

📷 Photo: H. Zell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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Which one is your favorite?