An outbuilding, sometimes called an accessory building[1] or a dependency, is a building that is part of a residential or agricultural complex but detached from the main sleeping and eating areas. Outbuildings are generally used for some practical purpose, rather than decoration or purely for leisure (such as a pool house or a tree house). This article is limited to buildings that would typically serve one property, separate from community-scale structures such as gristmills, water towers, fire towers, or parish granaries. Outbuildings are typically detached from the main structure, so places like wine cellars, root cellars and cheese caves may or may not be termed outbuildings depending on their placement. A buttery, on the other hand, is never an outbuilding because by definition is it is integrated into the main structure.
Separating these work spaces from the main home "removed heat, obnoxious odors, and offending vermin" and decreased the risk of house fires and food-borne illnesses.[2] The study of historical outbuildings also offers information about the lives of workers otherwise excluded from the history of a place, since one possible purpose of an outbuilding was to reinforce class boundaries.[3]
Outbuildings are typically constructed in a vernacular architectural style.[3] Outbuildings can be valuable resources for architectural historians as they may "offer insight unavailable in traditional documentary sources."[3] Architectural historian William Tishler argues that in addition to documenting outbuildings, researchers need to inspect attics and basements "because it's there that you see how things are put together."[4]
Researchers studying detached kitchens in Wiltshire identified some common characteristics of the outbuildings: non-standard floor plans, no large windows, location near the main house, footprint smaller than main house, and little or no interior ornamentation.[5]
Good farming and good outbuildings are invariably associated.
— Thomas Shaw, editor of Canadian Live Stock Journal (1888)[6]
^Allen, William (1910). "Harmonizing the Outbuildings," House & Garden. Condé Nast Publications. pp. 14–15.
^Linebaugh, Donald W. (1994). ""All the Annoyances and Inconveniences of the Country": Environmental Factors in the Development of Outbuildings in the Colonial Chesapeake". Winterthur Portfolio. 29 (1): 1–18. doi:10.1086/496641. ISSN 0084-0416. JSTOR 1181448. S2CID 162285380.
^ abcMcMurry, Sally (2014-01-01). "Buildings as Sources for US Agricultural History". Agricultural History. 88 (1): 45–67. doi:10.3098/ah.2014.88.1.45. ISSN 0002-1482. JSTOR 10.3098/ah.2014.88.1.45.
^Martin, Frank Edgerton (2002). "Field Trips Into History". Landscape Architecture. 92 (2): 80–91. ISSN 0023-8031. JSTOR 44673338.
^Broad, John (January 2015). "Making sense of Detached Kitchens: the implications of documentary evidence from seventeenth-century Wiltshire". Vernacular Architecture. 46 (1): 1–7. doi:10.1080/03055477.2015.1123411. ISSN 0305-5477. S2CID 164022626.
^Shaw, Thomas (1888). Essay on Construction of the Outbuildings on a Farm, Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture and Arts (Report). Ontario Department of Agriculture. pp. 102–114.
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