Illustration from Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture and Arts By Ontario

An outbuilding, sometimes called an accessory building 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 A tree house, tree fort or treeshed, is a platform or building constructed around, next to or among the trunk or branches of one or more mature trees while above ground level. Tree houses can be used for recreation, work space, habitation, a ha ...

), although luxury greenhouses such as orangeries or ferneries may also be considered outbuildings. This article is limited to buildings that would typically serve one property, separate from community-scale structures such as

gristmill A gristmill (also: grist mill, corn mill, flour mill, feed mill or feedmill) grinds cereal grain into flour and Wheat middlings, middlings. The term can refer to either the grinding mechanism or the building that holds it. Grist is grain that h ...

s, water towers, fire towers, or parish granaries. Outbuildings are typically detached from the main structure, so places like wine cellars,

root cellar A root cellar (American and Canadian English), fruit cellar (Mid-Western American English) or earth cellar (British English) is a structure, usually underground. or partially underground, used for food storage, storage of vegetables, fruits, nu ...

s 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. 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 Class, Classes, or The Class may refer to: Common uses not otherwise categorized * Class (biology), a taxonomic rank * Class (knowledge representation), a collection of individuals or objects * Class (philosophy), an analytical concept used d ...

boundaries. Outbuildings are typically constructed in a vernacular architectural style. Outbuildings can be valuable resources for architectural historians as they may "offer insight unavailable in traditional documentary sources." 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." Researchers studying detached kitchens in

Wiltshire Wiltshire (; abbreviated to Wilts) is a ceremonial county in South West England. It borders Gloucestershire to the north, Oxfordshire to the north-east, Berkshire to the east, Hampshire to the south-east, Dorset to the south, and Somerset to ...

identified some common characteristics of the outbuildings: non-standard

floor plan In architecture and building engineering, a floor plan is a technical drawing to scale, showing a view from above, of the relationships between rooms, spaces, traffic patterns, and other physical features at one level of a structure. Dimensio ...

s, no large windows, location near the main house, footprint smaller than main house, and little or no interior ornamentation.

Types

* Bunkhouses * Slave quarters * Tenant housing * Itinerant labor housing * Bothies * Wash houses *

Sauna A sauna (, ) is a room or building designed as a place to experience dry or wet heat sessions or an establishment with one or more of these facilities. The steam and high heat make the bathers perspire. A thermometer in a sauna is used to meas ...

s *

Lavoir A lavoir (, wash-house) is a public place set aside for the washing of clothes. Communal washing places were common in Europe until industrial washing was introduced, and this process in turn was replaced by domestic washing machines and by s ...

s (laundries) * Wood sheds *

Radio shack RadioShack (formerly written as Radio Shack) is an American electronics retailer that was established in 1921 as an amateur radio mail-order business. Its parent company was purchased by Tandy Corporation in 1962, which shifted its focus from ma ...

s * Barns, possibly incorporating

hayloft A hayloft is a space above a barn, stable or cow-shed, traditionally used for storage of hay or other fodder for the animals below. Haylofts were used mainly before the widespread use of very large Baler, hay bales, which allow simpler handling ...

s and/or outdoor animal

pen PEN may refer to: * (National Ecological Party), former name of the Brazilian political party Patriota (PATRI) * PEN International, a worldwide association of writers ** English PEN, the founding centre of PEN International ** PEN America, located ...

s *

Stables A stable is a building in which working animals are kept, especially horses or oxen. The building is usually divided into stalls, and may include storage for equipment and feed. Styles There are many different types of stables in use tod ...

for horses * Mangers * Hay barracks *

Outhouse An outhouse — known variously across the English-speaking world otherwise as bog, dunny, long-drop, or privy — is a small structure, separate from a main building, which covers a toilet. This is typically either a pit latrine or a bucket ...

s or privies *

Spring house A spring house, or springhouse, is a small building, usually of a single room, constructed over a spring. While the original purpose of a springhouse was to keep the spring water clean by excluding fallen leaves, animals, etc., the enclosing str ...

s * Ice houses * Pump houses or

windpump A windpump is a wind-driven device which is used for pumping water. Windpumps were used to pump water since at least the 9th century in what is now Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. The use of wind pumps became widespread across the Muslim world a ...

s * Tankhouses * Summer kitchens, detached kitchens, cookhouses, dirty kitchens, etc. * Bake ovens *

Smokehouse A smokehouse (North American) or smokery (British) is a building where meat or fish is curing (food preservation), cured with Smoking (cooking), smoke. The finished product might be stored in the building, sometimes for a year or more. *

Root cellar A root cellar (American and Canadian English), fruit cellar (Mid-Western American English) or earth cellar (British English) is a structure, usually underground. or partially underground, used for food storage, storage of vegetables, fruits, nu ...

s * Cold storage * Pit-houses *

Dugout (shelter) A dugout or dug-out, also known as a pit-house or earth lodge, is a shelter for humans or domesticated animals and livestock based on a hole or depression dug into the ground. Dugouts can be fully recessed into the earth, with a flat roof cov ...

* Wine cellars and wine caves * Cheese caves * Butcher houses (after an outdoor slaughter, preparing the cuts of meat for long-term storage would take place in a butcher house) * Poultry houses * Pigpens or piggeries * Milkhouses or dairy barns * Shearing sheds *

Dovecote A dovecote or dovecot , doocot (Scots Language, Scots) or columbarium is a structure intended to house Domestic pigeon, pigeons or doves. Dovecotes may be free-standing structures in a variety of shapes, or built into the end of a house or b ...

s, columbaria, ''pigeonniers'' * Dog houses, kennels *

Silo A silo () is a structure for storing Bulk material handling, bulk materials. Silos are commonly used for bulk storage of grain, coal, cement, carbon black, woodchips, food products and sawdust. Three types of silos are in widespread use toda ...

es * Granaries grain bins *

Corn crib A corn crib or corncrib is a type of granary used to dry and store corn. It may also be known as a cornhouse or corn house. Overview After the harvest and while still on the cob, corn is placed in the crib either with or without the husk. The ...

s * Rice barns, winnowing barns * Hemp-processing houses * Threshing barns * Potato houses *

Greenhouse A greenhouse is a structure that is designed to regulate the temperature and humidity of the environment inside. There are different types of greenhouses, but they all have large areas covered with transparent materials that let sunlight pass an ...

s * Illicit grow houses (marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, et al.) * Detached conservatories, orangeries, walipinis, pineapple pits, ferneries, etc. * Coach houses * Machine houses and tool sheds * Packhouses * Drying sheds, dry houses *

Kiln A kiln is a thermally insulated chamber, a type of oven, that produces temperatures sufficient to complete some process, such as hardening, drying, or Chemical Changes, chemical changes. Kilns have been used for millennia to turn objects m ...

s *

Forge A forge is a type of hearth used for heating metals, or the workplace (smithy) where such a hearth is located. The forge is used by the smith to heat a piece of metal to a temperature at which it becomes easier to shape by forging, or to the ...

s or smithies * Sugar shacks * Oast houses,

malt house A malt house, malt barn, or maltings, is a building where cereal grain is converted into malt by soaking it in water, allowing it to sprout and then drying it to stop further growth. The malt is used in brewing beer, whisky and in certain foo ...

s * Cider houses *

Still A still is an apparatus used to distillation, distill liquid mixtures by heating to selectively Boiling, boil and then cooling to Condensation, condense the vapor. A still uses the same concepts as a basic Distillation#Laboratory_procedures, ...

sheds * Tobacco barns * Gin house (for a

cotton gin A cotton gin—meaning "cotton engine"—is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation.. Reprinted by McGraw-Hill, New York and London, 1926 (); ...

) * Guard houses * Guest houses *

Workshops Beginning with the Industrial Revolution era, a workshop may be a room, rooms or building which provides both the area and tools (or machinery) that may be required for the manufacture or repair of manufactured goods. Workshops were the only ...

shed A shed is typically a simple, single-storey (though some sheds may have two or more stories and or a loft) roofed structure, often used for storage, for hobby, hobbies, or as a workshop, and typically serving as outbuilding, such as in a bac ...

* Detached garages * Scale sheds * Roadside stands * Garage * Storage room * Ware house

Types

Barn subtypes

See also

Derivative extravagance

References

Further reading