Why is My House Like This?
Thirteen Windows and One Very Old Question
Why did 1920s homes have enclosed porches? Thirteen windows at House 173 send us down another old-house rabbit hole.
There are thirteen windows on the front porch at House 173.
Thirteen.
I know this because back in 2011 we replaced every one of them, an experience that taught me two things: first, thirteen windows are a lot of windows for a room that isn't technically part of the house, and second, thirteen new windows cost considerably more than twelve.
For nearly three decades, I've thought about those windows mostly in terms of painting them, cleaning them, replacing them, decorating around them and occasionally wondering why any reasonable person would design the originals to swing into the porch.
But here's something I apparently never thought to ask:
Why are there thirteen windows out there in the first place?
Or, more fundamentally: Why does House 173 have an enclosed front porch?
After all these years, that seemed worth finding out.
First, Was It Always Enclosed?
That's the obvious question.
Plenty of old houses have enclosed porches that didn't start out that way. Somewhere along the line, somebody looked at an open porch and decided it would be considerably more useful with walls and windows around it.
That's certainly possible here.
But House 173 doesn't make the answer quite that easy.
We're unusually fortunate to know something about the people who lived here before us. An old photograph I posted back in 2011 shows the woman who, along with her husband, owned House 173 before we did.
And behind her is the porch.
Enclosed.
I documented that photograph, along with our replacement of the porch windows and door, here:
That doesn't prove the porch was enclosed on the day the house was finished. I haven't found an original blueprint with THIRTEEN WINDOWS GO HERE helpfully written across the front elevation.
But it does tell us that the enclosed porch isn't something we added, and the photographs we've inherited show it has been part of House 173 for a very long time.
Then there's the house itself.
The porch doesn't particularly look like somebody just filled in an open porch one weekend. Its roofline, proportions, trim and remarkable collection of windows make the whole thing feel fairly well integrated into the architecture.
So until House 173 gives up another clue, the safest conclusion is this:
The porch was either enclosed when the house was built or very early in its life.
And that's where this little investigation became much more interesting.
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The porch has been enclosed for as far back as our photographs of House 173 can establish. Whether it was built this way remains one of the house's little mysteries. |
Apparently, This Was Modern
Here's something I didn't expect.
Today we look at an enclosed porch on an old house and think:
Old house. Old porch. Old-fashioned.
Someone looking at a sun porch in the early 1920s might have thought almost exactly the opposite.
Modern.
I found a fascinating article in the May 1921 issue of American Builder called “Sun Parlors and Sleeping Porches.”
The article describes the sun parlor and sleeping porch as relatively recent developments in American building construction.
More interestingly, it traces how they evolved.
First there was little more than a hood over the entrance. That became a landing. The landing grew into a full porch. Then came screens.
And after that came glass.
The open porch was gradually becoming something else: a room occupying that wonderfully ambiguous territory between the house and the outdoors.
Suddenly, I wasn't looking at our porch quite the same way.
House 173 may not have a strange old enclosed porch.
It may have what somebody in the late 1920s considered a rather modern one.
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| By the 1920s, sun parlors and enclosed porches were being promoted as modern residential features built around sunlight, ventilation and lots of glass. |
Which Explains Those Thirteen Windows
I've always regarded the number thirteen primarily as a maintenance issue.
The original porch windows were particularly interesting.
They opened into the porch.
They looked nice.
They were also constantly in the way and, as I wrote in 2011, weren't the least bit weatherproof.
That eventually led to one of those bittersweet House 173 decisions where preserving something old finally loses the argument to actually being able to live with it.
We replaced them.
At the time, I regarded those original windows mostly as another peculiar arrangement somebody long ago had apparently thought was a good idea.
Now I think I understand them better.
The windows weren't incidental to the porch. The windows were the whole idea.
A sun porch wasn't necessarily supposed to function like another conventional room. The great advantage was being able to open a large portion of the room to fresh air when the weather cooperated, then close it against wind and rain when it didn't.
Thirteen operable windows make considerably more sense when you think about them that way.
The original owners weren't simply putting windows in a room. In a sense, they were building a room out of windows.
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| The original windows opened into the porch. For years I wondered why anyone thought that was a good idea. It makes considerably more sense once you understand what this room was supposed to do. |
Fresh Air Was Serious Business
There's another part of this story that's difficult to appreciate from our air-conditioned world.Americans of the early twentieth century were extraordinarily enthusiastic about fresh air.
Part of that was practical.
There was no central air conditioning at House 173. If it was 90 degrees outside, you didn't walk over to a little box on the wall, push a button and tell the house you'd prefer 72.
The house itself had to help.
Windows, porches, awnings, shade trees and cross ventilation weren't merely quaint architectural details.
They were part of the cooling system.
But there was also a health movement involved.
Fresh air and sunlight became closely associated with health during the tuberculosis era. Sleeping porches appeared on American houses during the early twentieth century, allowing people to sleep in open air while remaining sheltered by the house.
Smithsonian has an interesting overview of how Americans kept cool before modern air conditioning:
Sun parlors carried some of that same enthusiasm for light and air downstairs.
And once you understand that, a little city house surrounded by thirteen porch windows begins to make considerably more sense.
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| Before residential air conditioning, windows weren't merely something to look through. Ventilation was part of the way the house worked. |
An Extra Room Without Quite Building Another Room
There was another benefit that may have been even more practical... you got another room.
House 173 isn't a mansion.
I've said that many times over the years, usually shortly before spending an unreasonable amount of time fussing over some tiny architectural detail as though the Metropolitan Museum of Art is sending an inspector.
It's a modest city house on roughly one-tenth of an acre.
And in a modest house, an enclosed porch creates something extremely valuable... more usable space.
The 1921 American Builder article essentially described a sun parlor as an additional room.
That's exactly what ours became.
We've had chairs out there. Tables. Plants. Decorations.
We've sat there.
We've worked out there.
I slept out there... once.
We've piled things out there while working somewhere else.
It's been a staging area for projects, a temporary workshop, a place to sit on a pleasant day and, occasionally, a place to store whatever I haven't yet figured out what to do with.
It isn't completely outside.
It isn't completely inside.
That's precisely what makes it useful.
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| Nearly a century after enclosed porches became fashionable, ours is still doing essentially what these rooms were designed to do, giving a modest house one more useful place to live. |
Even Henry Ford Had One
This particular rabbit hole eventually led me to Henry Ford.
Not personally.
He's been dead since 1947.
But his house had a sun porch.
Henry and Clara Ford's Fair Lane estate in Dearborn, Michigan, was about as far removed from House 173 as you can get.
Fair Lane had 56 rooms.
House 173 has fewer.
Quite a few fewer.
There's additional information about Fair Lane here:
The interesting thing isn't that Henry Ford had a porch and so do we. It's that the same architectural idea worked at entirely different scales.
A sun porch provided a bright, informal place that felt different from the conventional rooms inside the house.
Lots of windows.
Casual furniture.
Sunshine.
Fresh air.
A room where the house could loosen its collar a little.
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| The sun porch at Henry and Clara Ford's Fair Lane home around 1925. House 173 is considerably more modest, but the underlying idea, a bright, informal room surrounded by glass, was much the same. |
And Then There's the Beadboard
When we emptied the porch again during the 2026 work, I found myself looking at the room differently.
Without furniture and all the usual stuff in the way, you notice the architecture.
The rhythm of the windows.
The trim.
The seams.
The ceiling.
Especially that beadboard ceiling.
I documented the preparation work here:
The National Park Service considers porches significant character-defining elements of many historic buildings and has an entire Preservation Brief devoted to understanding and maintaining historic wood porches.
You can read it here:
Their broader collection of preservation information is here:
I wish I'd had some of these publications 25 years ago.
Then again, I probably would have read them and immediately gone outside looking for something else to fix.
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| Emptying the porch during the latest project made the architecture easier to see, the beadboard, trim and almost continuous wall of windows. |
So Why Does House 173 Have an Enclosed Front Porch?
I'd love to end this by saying I found the original plans tucked away in an archive somewhere.I didn't.
There's still a difference between what we know and what we can reasonably suspect.
We know House 173's porch has been enclosed for a very long time.
We know enclosed sun porches and sun parlors were well established by the early 1920s.
We know contemporary builders promoted them for light, ventilation and additional usable living space.
We know fresh air mattered enormously in an era before residential air conditioning.
And we know that a room surrounded by operable windows fit remarkably well with the way houses were expected to function at the time.
What we don't know is whether somebody stood on this little patch of ground when House 173 was being built and specifically said:
Let's enclose the porch.
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| View from the living room. |
Maybe someday another photograph, building permit, newspaper item or drawing will turn up and answer that.
Until then, I'm comfortable saying this:
Our enclosed porch isn't peculiar (especially in our neighborhood)... It makes sense for the period.
And those thirteen windows I sometimes gripe about?
These days, I don't see thirteen windows. I see what somebody was trying to accomplish.
A room that could open itself to the neighborhood without quite being outside.
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| After all these years, the porch is still doing the job it was probably intended to do: providing a little space between House 173 and the world outside. |
A place for sunlight.
A place for air.
A little extra living space in a little city house.
Nearly a century later, after new windows, new doors, a ceiling fan, carpenter ants, endless painting, seventeen shades of green and more projects than I can possibly remember, that's still pretty much what it is.
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So that's why my house is like this.
And I suppose I owe those thirteen windows an apology.
Not a big one.
There are still thirteen of them.
The Next Mystery
Why Did the Original Porch Windows Open Inward?
Answering one question about House 173 has a bad habit of creating another.
We now have a pretty good idea why somebody wanted so many windows on the porch.
But that doesn't explain one of their strangest features.
They opened into the room.
Not out toward the yard.
Not by sliding conveniently up and down.
Into the porch... where an open window could occupy the same space as chairs, plants, people and anything else unfortunate enough to be standing nearby.
We lived with them. We fought with them. Eventually, we replaced them.
But I never really found out why somebody built them that way.
Was inward-opening sash common on enclosed porches? Did it make the windows easier to clean or maintain? Did screens have something to do with it? Was it a particular style of early porch window? Or was this simply one of those decisions made nearly a century ago that seemed perfectly sensible to the person holding the hammer?
There's only one way to find out.
That's the next mystery.
Related House 173 Posts
The 2011 project that documents the thirteen original inward-opening porch windows and their eventual replacement.
Another chapter in the continuing evolution of the front entrance to House 173.
The recent project that offered another close look at the porch's beadboard, trim, windows and nearly century's worth of movement.
Sources & Further Reading
Includes the period article “Sun Parlors and Sleeping Porches,” offering a contemporary look at these rooms before House 173 was built.
Detailed information about the history, construction and preservation of traditional wood porches.
A useful gateway to NPS information on porches, windows, woodwork, paint and other historic-building features.
Background on sleeping porches, fresh-air culture and life before residential air conditioning.
A documented period example of a sun porch from approximately the same era as House 173.
Additional historical context for Fair Lane and its sun porch.
Hey, thanks for stopping by - see ya' next time!
Keywords
enclosed front porch, 1920s enclosed porch, old house porch, sun porch history, sun parlor history, 1920s house architecture, historic front porch, old house windows, 1920s home design, vintage home architecture, historic wood porch, House 173, enclosed porch history