I've always heard it called a cwtch, but that's apparently just a Welsh thing.
It's Wales, unless you live in a city, the overwhelming majority of houses are two floored and terraced.
It was the easiest way to cram as many mining families in one place before the invention of tower blocks.
Real comrades get to their 4th-floor walk up by scaling the side of the building
if rope hoists are good enough for mining, they're good enough for homes!
Nonsense, cwtch is a very common word even in spanish too.
- 📍 Tweeted from Trelew, Argentina.
Ok this time for real, in spanish we have "cuchitril" that means "small space"/"hovel" and since starts with cuch I thought it might be related but no, etimology says it comes from nahuatl
The etymology of cwtch is kinda hard to pin down for various reasons.
One widespread theory is that it derives from couch, a Middle English word for lying down or possibly the Old French word Couche.
More proof that Nahua peoples made way cooler stuff than the colonizers.
We always called it the Harry Potter Room because we all lives in trailers.
If it has food in it, the pantry.
If it has anything else in it, the cupboard.
My parents' house had a floating staircase, because when the home was built in the 40s, it was used as an "experimental home" for a developer to show off new building techniques, and continually refurbished and updated. So, it's technically built in the 40s, but tons of it was updated every 5 years or so. In the 70s, it was sold to a buyer when the developer moved to a further out exurb to fill in the wetlands and build stupid ass mcmansions, so the house was a weird mishmash of the most "out there" design styles of the time. In floor heating decades before it became common, the aforementioned floating staircase, a massive two story great room that the front door opens right into, fully house-length hardwood flooring from when they were still clearcutting old growth forests, pecky cypress that they decided to paint over for some fucking reason.
However, given the weird construction and the fact that the previous owner just did no maintenance for 30 years, everything that made the house interesting and strange to visit also made it impossible to live in. No basement for just no reason, but they built the house into an artificial hill, so half of the first level is exposed, and the other half is underground. The garage didn't actually function as a garage, like you literally couldn't park a car in it or even fully open the garage door, because it had these pillars in the middle of it for no reason, they didn't actually do anything and weren't load bearing. The closets were not deep enough to hold a hanger in them unless you removed the doors. My parents ended up knocking down about 2/3 of the house and just rebuilding an entire house on top of what was left. None of the original rooms like the kitchen, bathrooms, or garage are where they were, because hookups were nonsensically laid out... Just a bizarre house which could have been a piece of odd local history, replaced with a dumb mcmansion. The only room they kept was the two story great room that used to take up about half of the floor space of the house, because of course they did, and they just built a third story on top of it.
Today I learned "w" is vowel in Welsh. Is cwtch pronounced cooch or couch in English?
Where I'm from that door always led to stairs down to the basement
Related - what's the name of the closet in a basement that's right under the front step to the house?
The tornado room, ours was always the deepest/most sheltered spot in the house
That's basically what we called ours too, but after looking it up it might be called a cold room or root cellar too. They're common in old houses, some even have a vent to the outside for food storage purposes.
I've never heard "root cellar" refer specifically to that room, but it makes sense. Fill that sucker up with tasty parsnips n shit
common misconception, the root cellar is actually the cellar that grants you full privileges over all other cellars in the basement operating system
