As I continue to celebrate Black History Month, I wanted to share a bit of history about houses that have long been found in Black Southern communities: the shotgun house.

I’ve always loved shotgun houses because they remind me of the historic streets where I grew up in New Orleans. Painted in bright colors with gingerbread style trim, they are full of Southern charm. I learned a lot more about this history when I was asked to re-design one for a realestate investor in NorthCarolina.

A longstanding theory is that the style, all over the Creole suburbs (faubourgs) of New Orleans, can be traced from Africa to Haiti and the Saint Dominican influences on house design during the 18th century and earlier. The name may have come from an African term “to-gun”, which means "place of assembly" but the description, probably used by  Afro-Haitian slaves, may have been misunderstood and reinterpreted as "shotgun".

A more popular idea is that if all the doors are opened, a shotgun blast fired into the house from the front doorway will fly cleanly to the other end and out at the back. The Black communities of New Orleans and other Southern cities like Wilmington, where I’ve been hired to reimagine this one, are filled with these houses.

Traditionally the houses are single-story, one-room-wide (about 12 feet) and three or four rooms deep. When you open the front door, you’re immediately in the living room, then onto one or two bedrooms, with the kitchen in the back. There are no hallways, so it's necessary to walk through one room to get to the next. Most were built without indoor plumbing, so a lot of shotgun houses today have had bathrooms added on to the back.

In my redesign, I created a second level that includes two guest bedrooms with a shared jack-and-jill bath, an office and a bonus gathering space. I also chose to add a lot more light. The traditional shotgun design had dark rooms because light could only enter from the front or back of the house.

I chose to use lots of large windows through-out, especially on the driveway side and high clerestory windows, which are windows above eye-level, because these houses always sit close to their neighbors. I’ve also added skylights in the hallways.

But perhaps one of my favorite things about Shotgun houses is the porch. In my redesign, I added a second level for private socializing off the primary suite. The downstairs front porch is perfect of a cocktail with the neighbors.

LEAVE A COMMENT and let me know what do you think of shotgun houses?