Shotgun Houses and Modern Front Loaded Homes with a Lengthwise Floor Plan

What are front-loaded homes?

They are narrow houses with the front on the narrow end. Many tiny houses are front-load. Often they have a front porch. The photo at the top of this page, the birthplace of Elvis Presley, is a front-loaded house with a front porch.

What is a Lengthwise Floor Plan?

Lengthwise just means in the direction of the longest side. A home with the entrance on the narrow side is going to have a lengthwise floor plan, with one room leading into another.

An earlier term is shotgun style.

Shotgun houses are charming, modest homes instantly recognizable for how narrow they are… Shotgun houses are small, single-story houses that are only one room wide (typically no more than 12 feet across) and two to four rooms deep without any hallway, which means you have to walk through each room to get to the next.

What Is a Shotgun House?
Southern Living, Maggie Burch, July 2022

More current houses are usually wider, with a hallway. But these narrow houses didn’t have space to waste.

The floor plan of historic shotgun houses typically went this way: The living room would be at the front of the house, followed by one or two bedrooms, with the kitchen at the back of the house. When first building these homes in the early 1800s, bathrooms weren’t part of the house but were often added later in a rear or side addition.

What Is a Shotgun House?
Southern Living, Maggie Burch, July 2022

Modern front loaded homes with a lengthwise floor plan usually have the bedroom at the back of the house. Typically you walk through the kitchen to reach it. A bathroom is often opposite the kitchen.

Shotgun houses near Mount Vernon, Alabama
George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America

When I first moved to Ft. Lauderdale, there were still a few shotgun style houses about a block away from me. They looked exactly like the houses in the photo above, except painted blue. That was the first time I had ever heard of a shotgun house. I explored because I thought they were abandoned, but they weren’t. An old man lived in the one in the middle. He told me it was a shotgun house because he could shoot out the front door from the back of the house. He lived in the one house and used the other two next to him as storage.

Shotgun Houses in New Orleans
Left and Right Photos by Infrogmation
Center Photo by David & Karyn

New Orleans is known for the neighborhoods of shotgun houses. But you can find them in a lot of other states, too.

Shotgun House in Thomas, Alabama
Robert Martin, Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS)

This shows a typical shotgun house. The front entry room is labeled as a bedroom, too.

Camelback Shotgun House in New Orleans
Photo by Infrogmation

Sometimes there is a two-story area on the back of the house, making it a Camelback Shotgun House.

Kuntz Shotgun House, 1401 East Washington Street, Louisville, Jefferson County, KY
Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS)

This plan shows a typical layout of a camelback shotgun house with the bedroom upstairs.

The obvious advantage to this design is that a lot of little houses could be put side-by-side on narrow lots. They were put all in a row, so they are also called row houses.