Over the years, these homes have stood through huge historical events, from world wars to the Great Depression, witnessing significant social changes along the way. Offering a glimpse into a past that sometimes looks unrecognisable to our modern eyes, these powerful pictures tell the story of how homes – and standards of living – have transformed over the last century. Click or scroll on to step back in time...

This picture from 1934 was taken for the Historic American Buildings Survey by photographer Ralph Clynne. Constructed between 1816 and 1821, the Arlington estate in Natchez, Mississippi is rumoured to have been built by New Jersey native John Hampton White for his wife, Jane Surget White. The two-storey red brick mansion became the couple's marital home and was filled with treasures. Nowadays, it's sadly abandoned.

This historic house in Watertown, Massachusetts was built in 1865 towards the end of the American Civil War. Commissioned as a new commander's quarters by Captain Thomas J. Rodman, the lavish home would have cost around $63,000 to build; a significant cost at the time. Inside the layout is built around a central hall, with heavy moldings, ceiling medallions and marble fireplaces adorning the interior.

In 1888, George Vanderbilt visited Asheville, North Carolina and was captivated by the area. He purchased 125,000 acres on which to build his country estate, enlisting architect Richard Morris Hunt to design him a home to rival the great country mansions of France. In 1895, Hunt delivered a 250-room château to serve as the lavish Vanderbilt family home. This image shows it halfway through construction.

Biltmore House is almost unfathomably large: the interior space unfolds over 178,000 square feet and includes 35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms and 65 fireplaces. The house today is thought to be worth around $150 million dollars (£123m) and in 1963 it was designated a National Historic Landmark. Still owned by the family, the estate has since opened its doors to guests who can stay at the four-star hotel and sample wines from the on-site vineyard.  

This incredible photo captures the aftermath of the notorious Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania in 1889. Skewered by an enormous uprooted tree, this house belonged to a Mr John Schultz who was one of six people inside to escape with their lives when the devastating flood hit. The structure was carried down the street by the force of the waters when the South Fork Dam broke, killing more than 2,200 people.

This photo shows the East Hamptons house of Edward Everett McCall, who ran unsuccessfully as the Democratic candidate for Mayor of New York City in 1913. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, wealthy families came to The Hamptons looking for a retreat from the city, including esteemed families such as the Kennedys. They built beach houses and holiday homes, transforming Long Island coastal farmland into some of the most expensive and sought-after real estate in the world.

Judging from the dress of the two women and the display of pewter plates above the mantel, you might imagine this picture to be much older than it is. It was taken in 1913 by photographer, artist and canny businessman Wallace Nutting, who made his fortune selling nostalgic prints that portrayed an idealised version of an ‘old world’ New England. As such, the houses were staged, and the subjects wore costumes. His prints reportedly earned him $1,000 a day, the equivalent of around $31,000 (£25k) in today's money. 

Captured in 1914, the Grey Gardens estate in East Hampton, New York is best known for being the one-time residence of the Beale family, specifically Edith 'Little Edie' Bouvier Beale, who was filmed living in squalor there with her mother in the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens. However, when this image of the gardens was taken, it was owned by Robert C. Hill and his wife. The imported Spanish concrete walls create a private sanctuary, with their grey hue giving the house its name.

During the First World War, many wounded soldiers were treated in abandoned châteaux throughout France. This photo was taken in 1915 and shows French and German soldiers in convalescence after serving at the front. Just look at the intricate mouldings across the walls vaulted ceiling above them! 

For four years during the First World War, Great Dixter House in East Sussex in the UK opened its doors to 380 wounded soldiers. The great hall and the solar (an upper-floor sleeping chamber) were converted into temporary wards to house 20 patients at a time. This picture was taken in 1916 and shows the soldiers and nurses eating in the requisitioned great hall. 

This shocking photo depicts the aftermath of the Great Molasses Flood of January 1919, when an enormous molasses storage tank in the North End neighbourhood of Boston burst, flooding the streets with 2.3 million gallons of thick, highly viscous molasses. The flood tore through the streets at 35 miles per hour, killing 21 people and injuring 150, as well as causing extensive property damage, as you can see from the devastated homes in this image. The flood cleanup took weeks, turning the Boston harbour brown until the summer, and entered into local lore, with Bostonians claiming that on hot days you can still smell the sweet scent of molasses.

It may have been the dawn of Modernism but at the beginning of the 1920s, wealthy homeowners were still fairly Victorian in their tastes. As for the working classes, many people would not have had indoor bathrooms. Most furniture would have been handmade as this was before mass production methods were around and open fires were still predominantly the main source of heating, as shown here. 

The 1920s was an economic boomtime and private spaces such as the bedroom would have been decorated in luxurious furnishings and expensive furniture sets. It was also the decade when electricity began making an appearance in the home, becoming much more widespread by the end of the decade. 

This photo of an elegantly dressed flapper standing in the foyer of her home can’t help but make you wonder just who she’s expecting to walk through the door. The image also demonstrates the juxtaposition of the 1920s, which in many ways was a decade of transition. While hemlines and hairstyles became shorter and more daring, interiors still largely embodied traditional domestic values, which are reflected by this staid, Georgian space.

The glamorous 1930s was the decade that Art Deco turned into Art Moderne. Stucco was a favourite, delivering a smooth surface and crisp finish to highlight the dramatic, geometric shapes. Driveways were also becoming increasingly common as more people bought their own cars, though these were still very much a luxury. 

While the decade is often thought of as glamorous, the 1930s were pretty tough going for many families. Times were hard but those who could afford it would splash out on the latest fashions and interior trends for their homes. Ivory, beige and metallics were all the rage in interior design and Modernism, with its clean lines and geometric shapes, took over from the Victorian frills and embellishments. 

This amazing bathroom epitomises what a luxury wash space would have looked like in the 1930s. Much like today, brass and marble were the height of fashion, with streamlined shapes and clean finishes becoming a feature in fashionable homes.

The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken Southern Plains region of the USA, which suffered severe storms during a dry period in the 1930s. High winds swept the region from Texas to Nebraska as people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region. In 1938, this shack and smallholding in the Coldwater District, north of Dalhart, Texas was still occupied, but abandoned farms were a common sight to see as people fled the area. 

In this picture, a farmer and two sons are seen trying to escape a storm in 1936 in Cimarron County, Oklahoma. The Dust Bowl lasted for around a decade. By 1934, an estimated 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land had become useless for farming and severe dust storms meant that many people developed chest pains. Even the most well-sealed homes couldn't escape the horror of living in grime and filth. 

Roughly 2.5 million people left the Dust Bowl states of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. Oklahoma had the biggest migration, as many people were left poverty-stricken. Homes suffered erosion from the wind and the accumulation of sand that was so huge that residents had to dig their houses out with shovels or let them get completely buried. Residents kept oiled clothes on window sills to try and collect the dust. 

Many families migrated away from the Dust Bowls but were then left homeless and without work. This photo shows a family from Texas in 1940 on the Arizona Highway 87, south of the city of Chandler. The family were migrants living in a trailer in an open field with no sanitation or water. 

The 1930s were also the time of the Great Depression. This man in El Cerrito, in San Miguel County, New Mexico is descended from one of the oldest families in his village, and his house was one of the oldest there. Taken in 1941, the photograph shows that although he lived in only one room, the house was made as homely as possible with picture frames on the walls and a central heater.

This photo, which was taken in 1936, shows some of the temporary buildings that were constructed to house people who worked on the Passamaquoddy Tidal Power Project. This simple modular housing was created to accommodate the influx of workers, the majority of which were young men, to the state of Maine. 

In 1930s Europe, many people were living in poverty, but rising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was accumulating power and with it wealth and resources. Like many property-hungry dictators, he commandeered the former German president's private apartment in Berlin's Reich Chancellery in 1934 and renamed it the Führerwohnung, meaning leader's apartment. The Nazi dictator was unimpressed with the space, which he thought looked "fit for a soap company”.

Hitler remodelled the residence in the late 1930s, filling the apartment with expensive art and antiques, many of which were stolen from victims of his horrific regime. The mastermind of the Holocaust, he was responsible for the genocide of six million Jews, along with millions of others from minority groups.

Hitler's private office was more compact and austere. Aside from his official Berlin residence, he owned a country retreat, the Berghof in Bavaria, along with an apartment in Munich. During the Second World War, he also spent more than 800 days in the fortified bunker known as the Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair) in a forest in modern-day Poland.

The Führerwohnung library contained Hitler's personal collection of books, which numbered an estimated 6,000 volumes. A voracious reader, Hitler is said to have got through one book a day, though many great works of literature were banned by the regime.

After the end of the Second World War, labourers, including miners, held a wave of strikes calling for better pay and working hours, as well as reforms to working conditions. This miner family in Kentucky is seen in the kitchen of their tiny three-room house. The couple lived with their six children and six grandchildren and rented the house for $6 a month, around $102 (£84) in today's morning. The home had no running water or electricity.

Captured in 1947, this modest kitchen belongs to miner Charles B. Lewis and his family. They lived in the company housing project for the Union Pacific Coal Company in Sweetwater County, Wyoming. Encompassing 160 houses overall, these dwellings were built to accommodate the company's workers.

This picture, taken in 1943, captures a stark contrast between old and new. A symbol of the rise of modern consumerism, the Coca-Cola sign atop the fruit stand sits alongside the traditional Queen Anne-style house. However, change was yet to hit some areas of the country, with many Americans still growing their own food and using horses for transportation.

Captured around 1940, this home in the American South was a typical modest property from this period. Due to the Great Depression, which only abated in 1939, many cabins in former mining hotspots were eventually abandoned and reduced to ghost towns, with rural residents relocating to larger cities around the 1950s. 

Boston's West End was a vibrant immigrant neighbourhood during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with tens of thousands of working-class residents packed into hundreds of tenement buildings. These cramped homes were initially single residences that had been split up into tiny multi-family dwellings. This picture, taken in 1940, shows children playing outside a tenement in Boston, Massachusetts.

Similarly, as the population increased in New York City, buildings that were once single-family homes were turned into multiple residences, known as tenements, sometime between 1820 and 1850. By the early 1900s, more than 80,000 has been built, housing around 2.3 million people. This 1913 image shows nine-year-old Jennie Rizzandi helping her parents sew garments in their dilapidated home.

Taken around 1911, these two children are pictured working in their tenement home on Hudson Street in New York City, while their unemployed father watches on. Their mother had a job picking nuts at the Braun Nut Factory, which earned her around $4 a week, while the children earned around $3 between them.

Following the end of the Civil War and into the Reconstruction Era when enslaved African American peoples were finally freed, sharecropping or tenant farming became common in southern American states like Mississippi. Landlords supplied farmers with very basic necessities, including housing, fuel and food. This image shows a tenant home beside the Mississippi River in 1940.

These tenant farmer houses consisted of log cabins or clapboard shotgun houses, with many featuring wooden shutters. Plumbing was non-existent and water was provided from nearby springs or wells. Captured around 1940, this old tenant house in Louisiana has a mud chimney, while fields of cotton surround the small dwelling.

Here, two children were photographed in 1939 playing on the steps of a clapboard tenant house on the Marcella Plantation in Mileston, Mississippi. By 1939, the cotton industry was in poor shape after failed harvests and in the following decades the birth of modern agricultural machinery drove many black farming families out of the rural south towards cities in what would become known as the 'Great Migration'.

Pictured in 1940, this is the dugout house of Faro Caudill, a homesteader. The house was located in Pie Town, New Mexico which was home to a number of migrants from the Dust Bowl states. Around 250 families lived in Pie Town at the time, leading modest, self-sufficient lifestyles.

Many of the families in Pie Town lived in dugout homes that were recessed into the earth, featuring flat roofs covered by turf. Their thick earth walls ensured the living space remained cool in the summer and warm in the winter. This rare image shows the Caudill family sharing dinner together in their small kitchen.

Fallout shelters were constructed as civil defence measures to reduce casualties in the event of a nuclear strike during the Cold War. This one was built by Louis Severance adjacent to his home near Akron, Michigan. It includes special ventilation, an escape hatch, a small kitchen and enough space to accommodate the family of four. The underground bunker cost around $1,000 to build, around $10,000 (£8k) in today's money, and offered running water and sanitary facilities too.

While many American families were building fallout bunkers, the White House was undergoing a complete reconstruction. After the grand structure was deemed unsafe, an extensive rebuild took place from 1949-1952. This photo shows the facade in 1951 in the midst of renovation works. The old sandstone steps were so worn that they had to be stripped out and replaced with stone.

Captured in 1950, this image shows how the steps leading from the first floor to the basement were dismantled. The renovation cost a reported $5.7 million (£4.7m) and during the process, the entire interior of the house had to be dismantled so that new load-bearing steel beams could be put in. 

The lower corridor was turned into a heap of rubble during the renovation, while the workmen demolished the walls. The house was taken apart bit by bit so that historical elements, including plaster mouldings and wood floors, could be salvaged. President Truman had to relocate to Blair House while the extensive works were carried out.

Fast forward to the Kennedy administration and this 1961 shot from the Blue Room displays all the splendour of Christmas in Camelot, as the Kennedy-occupied White House was known. JFK and Jackie stand next to a towering, elaborately decorated tree, ready to celebrate the holidays in one of the presidential mansion's most elegant entertaining rooms. For many Americans, the Kennedys epitomised a return to wholesome family values and the importance of home life.

On May 5th, 1955, the US Government detonated a 29-kiloton atomic bomb near the outskirts of a test town aptly named Survival Town. The experiment, known as Apple II, was designed to assess the resilience of homes made from different materials, which were placed at varying distances from the blast site.

Survival Town had a number of houses, trailer homes and office buildings, an electrical transformer station and a radio station. Incredibly, this two-storey wooden house, built around 7,500 feet from the detonation site, was still standing after the explosion.

The Monsanto House of the Future was an attraction at Disneyland's Tomorrowland in California from 1957 to 1967. The property was built to offer a glimpse of homes of the future, demonstrating the versatility of modern plastics and showcasing modern appliances such as microwave ovens, which would go on to become commonplace household features.

The Xanadu Houses were a series of experimental homes built during the early 1980s. Pictured here in Wisconsin, this UFO-style property was one of three futuristic homes constructed, with the other two found in Tennessee and Florida. A fast and cost-effective alternative to concrete, they were built with polyurethane insulation foam and featured some of the first smart home automation systems. Talk about eye-opening!

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