Why do old houses have two front doors, high ceilings, so many doors and low ceilings? The answers, room by room

Architecture · 4 September 2026

Old houses in the United States, from the 18th century to the 1920s, have features that make no sense to the people who live in them now, because they were built for a household without central heating, electric light, refrigeration, closets full of clothes, or a family car: the second front door was for visitors, the twelve-foot ceilings were the summer cooling, the door on every room let the family heat the one they were in, the transom over the door let air move with the door shut, and the small closet held all the clothes a person owned. Most of the folklore, the coffin door, the closet tax, the witch window, has a grain of truth in it and a larger part invented. Below: each feature, what it was really for, and where the myth comes from, with the styles these houses belong to in American house styles and Victorian architecture.

Two front doors

Farmhouses and town houses of the 19th century across the Midwest, Pennsylvania and the South, and Greek Revival and Italianate houses in New England, often have two front doors side by side or a few feet apart on the same facade. The usual reason is the formal parlor: one door opened into the parlor, the best room, used for receiving company, weddings, the minister's visit and laying out the dead, and the other into the family's living room or hall, so that guests could be admitted to the parlor without passing through the kitchen and the family could come and go without disturbing the parlor; in a house with a central chimney and no hall, two doors gave two rooms their own entrance. In Pennsylvania German and some Midwestern houses the two doors served a house divided between two generations or a family and hired help, or a home and a shop or office, and in the "hall-and-parlor" houses of the South each door served one of the two rooms. The "coffin door" or "death door", said to have been used only to carry out the dead, is folklore: coffins went out through the parlor door because the parlor was where the body was laid out, and the door was used every Sunday as well. The "tax" explanation, that a second door lowered a tax on the number of rooms or made the house count as two, has no basis in any American tax code; the door was about company. Parlour.

High ceilings

Ceilings of 10 to 14 feet in Victorian and Southern houses were the cooling system: hot air rises, and a tall room keeps the warm layer above the heads of the people in it, while tall windows with the top sash lowered let it out and a transom over the door lets it cross the house; in the South, with a porch to shade the windows and a central hall for the breeze, this was the only air conditioning. High ceilings also meant tall windows and more light in a house lit by candles and gas, and in the Victorian decades they were display, the height of the parlor being a measure of the owner; gas chandeliers needed headroom and produced heat and fumes that a high ceiling kept away. Heating them was the price, and the Victorians paid it with a stove or fireplace in every room, and by closing off the rooms they did not use.

Low ceilings

Colonial and early American houses, and cottages and farmhouses everywhere, have ceilings of 6.5 to 7.5 feet for the opposite reason: heat. A fireplace or stove heats a small volume faster, the beams of the floor above were the ceiling and were sized for what timber allowed, and people were a few inches shorter; in New England the low second floor under the eaves was also the cheapest space to build. The upstairs of a Cape Cod house is low because it is inside the roof. Doorways of 6 feet in old houses are the same story.

So many doors

A house heated room by room needs a door on every room, to keep the heat of the stove or fireplace in the room being used and out of the rooms that were not; before central heating, a family in winter lived in the kitchen and one sitting room and closed the rest, and a door between the dining room and the parlor, the parlor and the hall, the kitchen and everything, was the thermostat. Doors also gave privacy in houses where several generations, servants and boarders lived, and pocket doors between parlors let two rooms become one for a party. Central heating from the 1880s and the open plan of the 1950s made the doors pointless, and most have been removed, leaving the frames and the puzzled owners.

Tiny closets, or none

The story that closets were taxed as rooms in colonial times, or that a closet counted as a room for tax, is a myth repeated in every real-estate listing and unsupported by any tax law of any colony or state; the truth is that people had few clothes, two or three outfits, kept in a chest, a wardrobe or an armoire, on pegs, or in a trunk, and that a closet was a small storeroom for linen, not a place to hang clothes, which were folded until the wire hanger of 1869 and the ready-made wardrobe of the 1900s. Closets appear in American houses in the 1840s, grow in the 1890s, and become walk-in in the 1950s; a Victorian bedroom closet a foot deep with a shelf was normal.

The rest of the house

• Transom windows over doors. Ventilation and light: a hinged pane above the door let air and light through with the door shut, in houses without electric light or fans; the "transom" is the bar, the window the fanlight.
• A window on the stair landing. Light for the stair before electricity, and a place for the breeze to cross the house.
• A sink in the bedroom. Houses of 1890–1930 with one bathroom for a family of eight put a basin in each bedroom for washing and shaving; in boarding houses, for the lodger.
• The door to nowhere. A second-floor door opening on air was for a porch or balcony that was never built or was removed, for hauling furniture up by rope, or, on a barn or warehouse, for the hoist; in a few old houses it is the door of the old privy passage.
• The milk door. A small cupboard in the outside wall by the kitchen with a door on each side, where the milkman left the bottles and the housewife took them in without opening the house; from about 1900 to 1950, and often for ice too.
• The coal chute. An iron door low on the outside wall through which coal was shovelled into the basement bin under it, from the 1880s to the oil furnace of the 1940s; the bin is often still there.
• Laundry chute. A door in the upstairs hall dropping clothes to the basement or the kitchen, in houses with a servant or a large family, 1890–1950.
• The second staircase. The back or servants' stair from the kitchen to the upper hall, so that servants could reach the bedrooms without passing through the front rooms, in any house of 1850–1930 with a live-in servant, which was most houses of the middle class.
• A room off the front porch with its own door. The doctor's or lawyer's office, the sewing room, or the "sick room" where a contagious patient could be nursed without passing through the house.
• The Michigan basement, or root cellar. A dirt-floored cellar under part of the house for storing potatoes, apples and canned goods at cellar temperature, before refrigeration.
• Boot scraper by the door. Iron bar in the step for scraping mud and manure off boots in streets of horses.
• Push-button light switches, gas pipes in the ceiling, a bell board in the kitchen. The first electric switches of 1890–1920, the gas lights that came before, and the servants' bells rung from each room.
• The "witch window". A window set diagonally in the gable end of Vermont farmhouses, to fit a window between the roof and an addition; the story that witches cannot fly through a crooked window is a joke that stuck.
• A ceiling medallion and a hook in the middle of the room. For the gas chandelier or oil lamp; the medallion hid the smoke stain.

Versions and theories

• The closet tax. No colony or state ever taxed closets as rooms; the myth may come from English window taxes of 1696–1851 and from the brick tax, which were real, or from Philadelphia's tax on the number of storeys.
• The coffin door. The parlor door was used for funerals, and for everything else; the "funeral door" was the parlor.
• Two doors for two wives. A Utah story, sometimes true of polygamous houses of the 1860s–80s, not of the Midwest.
• High ceilings for hats. No; for heat.
• The door to nowhere was for suicides, or for airing the dead. Balconies, hoists and privy passages; the stories are Halloween.
• The witch window. Fits a window under a roofline; witches optional.

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