Resources on Luxury Mansions

Mansions

Defining a Mansion
In Europe mansions are often given various titles, hinting at their origins - castle, palace, manor, towers, and grange to name but a few. Some such as Sir John Vanbrugh's Castle Howard and Edwin Lutyens's Castle Drogo were built centuries after the last real castle was considered necessary. The term 'palace' in England is reserved to a mansion which is the London residence of a member of the Royal Family or an episcopal seat in a cathedral city. One exception is the great country house Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. In the Netherlands a palace is always connected to a member of the royal family. In the rest of Europe however a palace can be just a medium sized town mansion owned by anybody.
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There is no strict definition of how many rooms a house has to have before it can be termed a mansion, but realtors generally use the classification for houses with at least 8,000 square feet of floorspace. Until the mid 20th century the European mansion would often have a hall, two or three salons or drawing rooms, library, billiards room, ball room, dining room, breakfast room, morning room, study and numerous bedrooms. Until the middle of the last century European mansions were often short of bathrooms, often only two or three in a house of 20 plus bedrooms. In addition to the principal bedrooms would be far more for the staff usually on the uppermost or attic floors.

In London, the "mansion blocks" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are up-market apartment buildings with the exterior design of a mansion.

Excerpt from "Mansion." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 20 Apr 2006, 00:56 UTC. 1 May 2006, 12:01 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mansion&oldid=49213473