25 Old Money Home Features That Quietly Disappeared After 1980

Twenty-five features that were standard in well-built American homes before 1980 — butler's pantries, plaster walls, slate roofs, sleeping porches, transom windows, and the mortgage button hidden inside the newel post. They didn't vanish because they stopped working. Most of them are still functioning in houses built a century ago. They vanished because of a single change in how American homes were financed, appraised, and sold — and once you know what that change was, every one of these disappearances makes brutal sense.