Loft Apartment
This type of apartment developed in North America during the middle of the 20th century. The term initially described a living space created within a former industrial building, usually 19th century. These large apartments found favour with artists and musicians wanting accommodation in large cities (New York for example) and is related to unused buildings in the aging parts of cities. These Loft apartments were usually located in former highrise warehouses and factories left vacant after town planning rules and economic conditions in the mid 20th century changed. The resulting apartments created a new bohemian lifestyle and are arranged in a completely different way from most urban living spaces, often including workshops and art studio spaces. As the supply of old buildings of a suitable nature has dried up developers have responded by constructing new buildings in the same aesthetic with varying degrees of success.
Facilities
Apartments may be available for rent furnished or unfurnished.
Laundry facilities may be found in a common area accessible to all the tenants in the building, or each apartment may have its own facilities. Depending on when the building was built and its design, utilities such as water, heating, and electricity may be common for all the apartments in the building or separate for each apartment and billed separately to each tenant. (Many areas in the US have ruled it illegal to split a water bill among all the tenants, especially if a pool is on the premises.) Outlets for connection to telephones are typically included in apartments. Telephone service is optional and is almost always billed separately from the rent payments. Cable Television and similar amenities also cost extra. Parking space(s), air conditioner, and extra storage space may or may not be included with an apartment. Rental leases often limit the maximum number of people who can reside in each apartment.
On or around the ground floor of the apartment building, a series of mailboxes are typically kept in a location accessible to the public and, thus, to the mail carrier too. Every unit typically gets its own mailbox with individual keys to it. Some very large apartment buildings with a full-time staff may take mail from the mailman and provide mail-sorting service. Near the mailboxes or some other location accessible by outsiders, there may be a buzzer (equivalent to a doorbell) for each individual unit. In smaller apartment buildings such as two- or three-flats, or even four-flats, rubbish is often disposed of in trash containers similar to those used at houses. In larger buildings, rubbish is often collected in a common trash bin or dumpster. For cleanliness or minimizing noise, many lessors will place restrictions on tenants regarding smoking or keeping pets in an apartment.
Multifamily
Garden Apartments. Suburban garden apartments started popping up in the 1960s and 1970s, as young people moved from urban centers to the suburbs.
In some locales, a garden apartment complex consists of low-rise apartment buildings built with landscaped grounds surrounding them. The apartment buildings are often arranged around courtyards that are open at one end. Such a garden apartment shares some characteristics of a townhouse: each apartment has its own building entrance, or shares that entrance via a staircase and lobby that adjoins other units immediately above and/or below it. Unlike a townhouse, each apartment occupies only one level. Such garden apartment buildings are almost never more than three stories high, since they typically don’t have elevators/lifts. However, the first “garden apartment” buildings in New York, USA, built in the early 1900s, were constructed five stories high. Some garden apartment buildings place a one-car garage under each apartment. The interior grounds are often landscaped.
In other locales, a garden apartment is a unit built at or below grade or at ground level.[6] The implication is that there is a view or direct access to a garden from the apartment, but this is not necessarily the case.
In most West Coast cities in the United States, due to the need for resisting earthquakes at a low building cost, these low-rise apartments are mostly built of wooden frames with thin plaster-board based exterior and interior dry walls, despite sometimes being on as many as three or four levels
Midrise Apartments. These properties are usually 5-9 stories, with between 30-110 units, and elevator service. These are often constructed in urban infill locations.
Highrise Apartments Highrise apartments are found in larger markets, usually have 100+ units, and are professionally managed.