A quirk of architecture

[000zing]

Just a story start device.

Family moves into a large older house which has strange, counter-intuitive internal corridors and divisions with not all right angles running true and slopes where there should be none.

After several months of being in residence, teenage son notices that, along one particular corridor at one specific spot, one crazily-positioned first floor (or "second", to you benighted Yanks) window allows for peering across an internal courtyard and through a ground floor ("first") bathroom window. Anyone coming in or out of the shower/bath there can easily be seen.

Feel free to use, if interested.

 

[Carnevil9]

Most "Yanks" don't live in houses large enough to have courtyards, or enough floors to require debates about how to number them. Your story idea sounds more adapted to a Dickens novel. Not that I'm suggesting it is a bad idea! I can see many good possibilities. Just that it sounds more like a Victorian period piece than anything else.

 

[sirhugs]

Most "Yanks" don't live in houses large enough to have courtyards, or enough floors to require debates about how to number them. Your story idea sounds more adapted to a Dickens novel. Not that I'm suggesting it is a bad idea! I can see many good possibilities. Just that it sounds more like a Victorian period piece than anything else.

most pre-1900 towns and cities will have a few older homes that may not havbve courtyards, but will have miuliple stoeys, quirky architecture, maid's quarters etc.

without that, the Scooby gang would be out of business...

 

[sirhugs]

most pre-1900 towns and cities will have a few older homes that may not havbve courtyards, but will have miuliple stoeys, quirky architecture, maid's quarters etc.

without that, the Scooby gang would be out of business...

see... a ghost post

 

[000zing]

Most "Yanks" don't live in houses large enough to have courtyards, or enough floors to require debates about how to number them. Your story idea sounds more adapted to a Dickens novel. Not that I'm suggesting it is a bad idea! I can see many good possibilities. Just that it sounds more like a Victorian period piece than anything else.

Well, maybe not a courtyard but you get the general idea. Here in the UK there are still vast numbers of pre-1900 buildings in the national housing stock. More's the pity, some might say.

 

[alohadave]

Most "Yanks" don't live in houses large enough to have courtyards, or enough floors to require debates about how to number them. Your story idea sounds more adapted to a Dickens novel. Not that I'm suggesting it is a bad idea! I can see many good possibilities. Just that it sounds more like a Victorian period piece than anything else.

But there are plenty of apartment buildings with courtyards. Lots of opportunities for V&E.

 

[sirhugs]

or some billionaire built a quirky mansion just because he could, then invested in vanity projects and lost it all.

 

[LupusDei]

Well, I have identified just such places peeping into gym's girls locker room in two (very different) school buildings I have frequented so there's no real need for especially strange architecture, just some neglect.

In one, one would look out of high placed boys toilet window down a story to similar in basement level across a small inner courtyard. The large hall windows in the perpendicular wall didn't offer any interesting angle, but hinted the possibility.

The other, the angle was from a specific spot midway down a flight of the secondary stairs, out through the all-glass end wall, down a floor into high windows at an angle. Those windows used to be painted shut (as per Soviet custom), but a renovation replaced them with clear ones... to me it seemed crazy how seemingly no one paid attention (for over a year, at least), but then, it was only potentially interesting at select times when, as it happens, everyone was supposed to be in class anyway.

 

[sirhugs]

Well, I have identified just such places peeping into gym's girls locker room in two (very different) school buildings I have frequented so there's no real need for especially strange architecture, just some neglect.

In one, one would look out of high placed boys toilet window down a story to similar in basement level across a small inner courtyard. The large hall windows in the perpendicular wall didn't offer any interesting angle, but hinted the possibility.

The other, the angle was from a specific spot midway down a flight of the secondary stairs, out through the all-glass end wall, down a floor into high windows at an angle. Those windows used to be painted shut (as per Soviet custom), but a renovation replaced them with clear ones... to me it seemed crazy how seemingly no one paid attention (for over a year, at least), but then, it was only potentially interesting at select times when, as it happens, everyone was supposed to be in class anyway.

and who said Soviet Russia was dull?

 

[LupusDei]

and who said Soviet Russia was dull?

Well,

first, to equate Soviet Union with Russia is insulting to the occupied/colonized nations (especially in the present context of the ongoing genocidal war in Ukraine) and those experiences wasn't in Russia, both buildings are in a NATO country now.

Then,

yes, I think there is some historical background to why there's even now so many sex workers from Russia and ex-Soviet block in general: besides the economic factors, the taboos are relatively relaxed and compartmentalized.