The 14-foot-wide Philadelphia row home is an exercise in constraint. Two rooms wide at most, often just one, with a staircase that takes a significant bite out of whatever floor plan you have: it is not, by any objective measure, a lot of space. And yet row home owners across the city manage to make these houses feel generous, livable, and even beautiful.
The secret is not magic. It is a set of design principles that work specifically with the narrow-house typology — principles that emerge from the architecture itself. Here are seven rules that row home owners and designers return to again and again.
1. Treat the Depth as a Feature
The temptation in a narrow house is to fight the depth — to try to make rooms feel wider than they are. This almost always fails. Instead, embrace the sequence. A row home moves you through space front to back: living room, dining room, kitchen, yard. Each transition is a moment of compression and release. Design with that movement in mind. A slightly lower ceiling in the dining room makes the kitchen feel more open. A half-wall between spaces keeps the sightline moving while creating definition.
2. Keep Furniture Off the Walls
In a wide room, pushing furniture to the walls creates a dead center. In a narrow room, it makes the room feel like a hallway. Pull sofas and chairs away from the walls — even six inches makes a difference. It creates a sense that the furniture belongs to the room, not to the perimeter, and that the room is wide enough to have a center at all.
3. Use Mirrors Strategically, Not Decoratively
A mirror on the end wall of a narrow room doubles its apparent depth. A mirror on the long wall widens the room visually. The key word is strategically: place mirrors where they reflect light sources (windows, lamps) or views that improve with repetition. A mirror that reflects a cluttered wall just doubles the clutter.
4. Run Flooring Parallel to the Depth
In a narrow room, running wood floors or tile perpendicular to the long axis emphasizes the narrowness. Running them parallel — front to back — draws the eye through the space and makes the room read as longer and, by association, more proportionate. This is a small thing with a significant effect, especially in rooms where you see the floor from multiple angles.
5. Use the Staircase Wall
The party wall beside the staircase is one of the most underused surfaces in the Philadelphia row home. It is typically a long, uninterrupted run of wall from first floor to third — ideal for built-in shelving, a gallery wall, or vertical storage. The staircase wall is also the one surface in the house where height can be maximized without visual penalty, because you are looking up at it while climbing anyway.
6. Let the Kitchen Go Narrow
The galley kitchen — two parallel runs of counter facing each other — is perfectly suited to the row home floor plan. Resist the urge to put an island in a narrow kitchen. An island in a 12-foot-wide kitchen leaves barely enough room to open the oven and the refrigerator at the same time. A tight galley with good storage, a window at the end, and a clean sightline to the rear yard is more functional and more elegant than a compromised island.
7. Maximize the Rear Opening
The rear wall of a Philadelphia row home — typically opening onto a small yard — is the one place where you can borrow space visually and literally. A full-width glass door or set of French doors to the rear yard extends the kitchen or dining room into the outdoors for most of the year. Even in winter, the borrowed light from the rear makes the interior feel larger. If a renovation is on your horizon, the rear opening is the highest-return modification available.
None of these rules require a major renovation. Most can be implemented with furniture rearrangement, flooring choices, and a few well-placed mirrors. The 14-foot row home is not a problem to be solved — it is a typology with its own logic. Work with it, and the space becomes more than adequate. It becomes exactly right.