Brownstone, Townhouse, Rowhouse

Photo from the Boston Globe.

The Boston Globe reports in "Row house, town house, brownstone. Confused by what's what? Here's a primer on the buildings that help define Boston" about a forthcoming book by the below-mentioned Kevin D. Murphy. From the article:

It is a question that has vexed real estate brokers and lovers of urban architecture for generations: What's the difference between a town house, a row house, and a brownstone? Boston native Kevin D. Murphy, whose book ''The American Townhouse" will be published in November, defines each:

Town house: A multistory urban house, attached or detached, that is built close to the street and scaled similarly to surrounding houses.
Row house: A multistory urban house built in a style that is consistent with, even replicating, that of adjoining houses; often built by the same architect and developer.
Brownstone: Any of the above structures whose façades are sheathed in brown sandstone.

So town house is an overall term, row house a subset of that, and brownstone a further subset of both.

''Town houses were often designed to be unique," said Murphy, who teaches art history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. ''But row houses strove for consistency. Sometimes sameness is boring, but sometimes it gives the streetscape a unity, instead of each building doing its own thing. And the term brownstone is simply about material, although in New York it's come to mean any row house built before 1910 as a single-family home."