Over the years, the homes you are about to see have stood through huge historical events. From world wars to climate catastrophes, they have witnessed 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. To enjoy these pictures on a desktop computer FULL SCREEN, click on the icon at the top right of the image...  

These two Māori girls were photographed in 1891, greeting each other by rubbing noses outside a traditional home adorned with carvings and paintings. The curved patterns and spirals were inspired by ferns and other plants native to New Zealand, while the door lintel appears to depict Ranginui, the sky father, and Papatūānuku, the earth mother, and the story of creation.

The scene was captured by British-New Zealand photographer Thomas Pringle and collected by Charles Longfellow, the son of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Made up of 150 rooms and 23 ceremonial 'kivas', Cliff Palace is the largest dwelling in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado. Built between 1190 and 1260, it was inhabited by the Ancestral Puebloans and would have housed around 200 people. The buildings were made from wooden beams, mortar and sandstone, which the Puebloans shaped into blocks using harder stones collected from riverbeds.

There are 600 cliff dwellings in the park, the vast majority of which have five rooms or fewer, making Cliff Palace truly remarkable. This site was photographed by Gustaf Nordenskiöld in 1891. 

Frances Benjamin Johnston took this photo of an African American cook or maid in the White House kitchen between 1891 and 1893. Note the old wood-fired range oven and simple shelving; this was years before fitted kitchens and electrical appliances became the norm.

Johnston was one of the first American women to make her name as a photographer. Born into a socially prominent family, her social status helped her enter the White House as an official photographer from the 1880s to the 1910s, snapping presidential portraits and everyday scenes. She went on to become an established architectural photographer. 

A German immigrant family sits on the terrace of their home near the Rio Pachitea in 1885.

The first German and Austrian Catholic immigrants arrived in Peru in the late 1850s, enticed by the promise of free passage, land, healthcare and a six-month supply of food. In return, they were to resettle in Peru's jungle regions. While many died on the journey and during their early days in South America, today there are around 250,000 Peruvians of German descent.

J. D. Semler poses with his wife Lillie, their two young children and a donkey outside his sod house near Woods Park in Custer County, Nebraska in 1886. It was in Nebraska that the first homestead was claimed under the 1862 Homestead Act.

The act, passed by Abraham Lincoln, meant any citizen could claim 160 acres (0.4ha) of surveyed land. After five years of farming the same plot, they were entitled to it 'free and clear'. By 1904, 80 million acres (32m ha) had been claimed by homesteaders. The scheme was intended to speed the settlement of the western territories, but in doing so it displaced Native American communities and destroyed their way of life forever.

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 taken in 1901 shows a rustic dwelling in Australia, shortly after it became a federated nation, uniting six British colonies into the Commonwealth of Australia. This period saw a huge wave of change in the country, but while cities modernised, rural life remained tough.

Homes were often simple timber or corrugated iron structures, built to endure harsh conditions. Many settlers lived in slab huts or weatherboard cottages without electricity or running water. Open fireplaces provided heating and rainwater tanks or wells supplied water. Of course, the wealthier landowners had larger homes with all the mod cons. But rich or poor, isolation was a challenge, with horses and telegraphs as the main links to wider society.

An Inuit family sit on blocks of compressed snow topped with animal hides as they pose inside their igloo in Fullerton, Canada in 1904. Fire pits for cooking stand on a platform at the back of the room, while cooking utensils hang from wooden shelves. 

Incredibly, a correctly built igloo can be up to 40% warmer inside than the environment outside, simply by trapping body heat and protecting the inhabitant from wind chill.

Another photo that's hard to believe, this is one of the Victorian homes on Howard Street in San Fransico that survived the April 1906 earthquake.

The quake which began around 5am local time had a magnitude of 7.9 and caused heavy damages to the entire area. Tragically, more than 3,000 people died and over 80% of the city was destroyed after devastating fires broke out which lasted for several days.

This photo taken in 1909 shows the interior of a crofter's cottage on the Scottish island of Shetland, located in an archipelago lying between Orkney, the Faroe Islands and Norway.

Everyday life would have taken place around the large open fireplace, which was essential for keeping warm in the extreme weather conditions. You can see a woman sitting spinning wool while her husband reads, and strands of yarn hang drying on a line strung from the rafters above. 

This photo was taken in Germany during the late 19th or early 20th century, a time of great change for the country. After the unification of Germany in 1871, the economy briefly boomed before a worldwide depression hit in 1873, which saw hundreds of thousands of Germans emigrate to North and South America. 

Many of those who remained moved from the countryside into towns and cities as the manufacturing of chemicals, motorcars and electrical products eclipsed agriculture – as these German farmers will have been all too aware.

In 1915, when this photo was taken, log cabins were mostly found in rural areas and national parks. These simple, sturdy structures provided shelter in harsh climates, often with sod roofs and fireplaces for warmth.

Trappers and fur traders sometimes used cabins as seasonal dwellings in remote regions, while Indigenous communities sometimes incorporated log construction into traditional housing. 

Built between 1905 and 1911, the Stoclet Palace in Brussels, Belgium was created by architect Josef Hoffmann for banker Adolphe Stoclet. As it is still privately owned by Stoclet's descendants, modern photos of the interior are rare but this 1914 image gives us a glimpse inside the extraordinary home.

The bath is made from a single hollowed-out block of marble and stands on a raised platform, surrounded by walls adorned with mosaic fish. In 2010, the luxury residence was valued at €100 million (£83m/$104m).

This photo was taken in 1915 and shows French and German soldiers in convalescence after serving at the front. During the First World War, many French châteaux were repurposed as hospitals for wounded soldiers, often offered up by their aristocratic owners who helped to run them.

Volunteers, including British and American nurses, often staffed them. Conditions varied – some had modern amenities, while others were hastily adapted and some were damaged during the conflict. Their role was crucial in treating casualties, offering respite from the frontlines and contributing to the war effort.

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.

Kaiser Karl I (Charles I), the last Emperor of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Italian Princess Zita de Bourbon-Parma are seen here in their home near Lake Geneva, Switzerland in 1918. Following Austria's defeat in the First World War, the royal family was exiled first to Switzerland and later to the island of Madeira, Portugal.

The couple's five children sit with them. They went on to have two more children before Charles died of pneumonia in 1922, aged 34, with another born shortly after his death. Zita, who herself had 23 siblings, remained in mourning until she died at the age of 96 in 1989.

This shocking photo depicts the aftermath of the Great Molasses Flood of January 1919. An enormous molasses storage tank in the North End neighbourhood of Boston, USA 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 cleanup took weeks, turning the Boston harbour brown until the summer. 

While this 1920s photo of a family in front of their house at Kalterherberg, near Monschau in Germany may look idyllic, life was tough for Germans after the First World War. Crippled by hyperinflation, the Great Depression and war reparation payments to the tune of £6.6 billion (about £274bn/$340bn today), the future for Germany looked bleak. 

The collapse of the German mark in 1923 left families struggling to afford essentials. Traditional farming methods dominated, with limited mechanisation, and harsh winters made life even harder. Many rural Germans even relied on barter to get by.

The Chicago area proved a popular destination for Lithuanian immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It became home to the world's largest expat Lithuanian population, earning Chicago the nickname 'Little Lithuania'. As of 2024, more than 74,000 Lithuanians live in Illinois – more than any other state in the US.

As we can see from this photo of a Lithuanian man posing in his Chicago bedroom around 1920, some immigrants surrounded themselves with momentoes from their Motherland. These walls are adorned with religious iconography.

These pictures demonstrate the differences between rich and poor, and traditional and modern lifestyles in 1920s North America.

The photo on the left shows a Sarsi woman cooking over a campfire in Alberta, Canada around 1927. On the right, a woman prepares a meal on a gas stove. Stoves like this, with an integrated oven and top burners, were fairly common in middle-class homes by the 1920s.

This farmhouse kitchen lies somewhere between traditional and modern ways of living. Here, a housewife and her daughter are photographed in 1923 inside their Ontario County home.

Both the iron and the wooden washing machine are plugged directly into the electricity supply via a light socket hanging from the ceiling.

A  young woman kneels by a fountain in Seville, Andalusia, in a photo published in 1927. Many traditional Spanish homes were built around courtyards with white walls and red roofs. A shady veranda covered in creeper provides relief from the sun, while potted flowers brighten the paved court. Families spend much of the day here, with chairs and furniture placed along the walls.

The kitchen, seen on the left, lacks a gas cooker. Cooking is done over small charcoal stoves built into the wall, with fuel added through square holes. Meals are prepared in pots or pans, as there are no ovens. Kitchen utensils, including pottery casseroles, hang on the wall.

In the 1920s and 30s, when this photo was thought to have been taken, Greece was a largely agrarian society and poverty was widespread among peasants.

Many worked small plots with outdated farming methods, leading to low yields of olives, wheat and grapes. Land distribution was unequal, and many farmers were either landless or had insufficient land. Debt to landlords and moneylenders kept them trapped in poverty.

For some, the 1920s was a fun-filled decade of hedonism and nothing epitomised this more than the flapper. Typically young and fashionable Western women, flappers flouted the social conventions of the day, attended dances without a chaperone and sported short dresses and bobbed hair. 

This flapper models a stylish headband and fur coat in her lavish bedroom; possibly a brand-new one judging by the gift box in the bottom left of the picture.

The glamorous 1930s was the decade that Art Deco turned into Art Moderne as this grand home shows.

Stucco a construction material used to cover walls, ceilings, and exterior walls 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. 

Albert Einstein and his second wife Elsa are seen here in their home near Berlin in 1930, nine years after the mathematical physicist won the Nobel Prize for Physics. Their large parlour is typical of the period, with Wilhelminian-style furniture and patterned wallpaper dominating the room.

Born in Ulm, Germany, Einstein renounced his German citizenship in 1896 and became a Swiss citizen in 1901. However, he moved to Berlin to continue his work in 1914, before emigrating to America in 1932.

This Spanish farmhouse might look incongruous standing in the middle of Leipzig, Germany but it was there for a reason. It was built during the city's spring fair in March 1933 and it housed Spanish products, promoting them to German shoppers.

The building is a 'barraca', which traditionally housed workers and fisherman in Spain's Valencia region. Its white-washed walls and thatched roof are typical of the homes, which first appeared in the 16th century.

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 family posed for a momentous photo in Edmonton, Canada in April 1930. Hanna Headley, aged 107, holds her great-great grandson, one-month-old Douglas Brown. They're surrounded by Hanna's son Leonard George, 76, beaming with pride, his daughter Ethel Upton, 47, and her daughter Gladys Brown, 20. 

During the 1930s, Edmonton would struggle with the effects of the Great Depression which left millions of Canadians unemployed, hungry and homeless. 

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 this picture, a farmer and two sons are seen trying to escape a dust storm in 1936 in Cimarron County, Oklahoma. The Dust Bowl lasted for around a decade. By 1934, an estimated 35 million acres (14m ha) of formerly cultivated land had become useless for farming.

The earliest cave dwellings on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria were built by the Guanche, a Neolithic people who first inhabited the Canary Islands. The underground homes – or 'cuevas' – developed over the centuries from simple structures containing a fire pit into more sophisticated houses and even places of worship.

These cave homes are in La Atalaya and were photographed in the early to mid-20th century. Nowadays, many of the islanders still live in modernised cave homes. Tourists today can stay in the pretty white-washed cuevas, some of which have wood-burning stoves, full kitchens and swimming pools.

A man called Henry Robinson was photographed in front of his house in 1937, as part of a programme undertaken by the US Works Progress Administration to capture portraits of formerly enslaved African Americans. Some of their stories were recorded by the Federal Writers' Project 'slave narratives' collections.

Many people who had once been enslaved became sharecroppers and lived in houses like this one, which consisted of log cabins or clapboard shotgun houses. Plumbing was non-existent and water was provided from nearby springs or wells.

This picture, taken in 1940, shows children playing outside a tenement in Boston, Massachusetts.

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.

Domestic life is never done, even if you live in a 'tent city'. This photo from 1942 shows life in Nevada, where a temporary housing solution for mine workers and their families was a collection of tents erected in the city of Henderson.

Henderson was a town created during the 1940s, but quickly became one of the most important suppliers of of magnesium during the Second World War. Companies like Basic Magnesium Incorporated began operating in the area and families moved in. In 1953, it became the City of Henderson, now the 2nd most populous city in Nevada, after Las Vegas.

This fascinating photo from 1943 shows bomb damage to a London street during the Second World War, somewhere near Battersea power station, which you can glimpse in the top right of the image with its white chimneys.

What makes it more interesting is the process used to create it. Known as a Dufaycolor photograph, it uses an early British film process first introduced for still photography in 1935.

During the Second World War, many families in England lost their homes due to bombing so temporary accommodation had to be found quickly. Enter the Nissen Hut, which was designed during the First World War by the engineer and inventor Major Peter Norman Nissen.

The hut's semicircular shape and corrugated iron deflected shrapnel and bomb blast, making it ideal housing for troops, barracks and the displaced, as captured in this photo from the 1940s taken in a suburb called Teddington, on the outskirts of London.

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.

This extraordinary photo shows workmen looking on as a house is loaded onto the back of a truck in the 1940s. 

Homes were – and still are – picked up and moved for all sorts of reasons. It's usually to deliver a newly built home to its plot, protect a historic home that would otherwise be knocked down, move a house when a new road is being built or to avoid environmental threats like flooding. In 1919, the entire town of Hibbing, Minnesota was moved two miles south to make way for an iron ore mine.

This unusual house stands on a country road near Kildare, Ireland. Elizabeth 'Basy' O'Beirn, who was pictured standing in front of her cottage in 1947, decorated it with seashells, stones, pieces of glass and bottle tops. Over the course of 15 years, she collected the items from Irish and European beaches and used them to depict a shamrock, the Irish Harp, the Ardagh Chalice and a local church.

Although O'Beirn died in 1967 the house is a local landmark and still retains its cheery exterior today.

After the White House was deemed unsafe, an extensive rebuild took place from 1949 to 1952. As this 1950 photo shows, 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.

The renovation cost a reported $5.7 million (about $75m/£60m today) 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.

Snapped in 1950, a man and a woman stop to chat outside a farm in the small town of Rust, in the Burgenland province of Austria. Corn cobs hanging out to dry, as we see above them, would have been a common site in the region, which was largely agricultural.

Today, maize is the country's second biggest crop after wheat and corn cobs can still be seen hanging from homes and barns, although usually more for decorative rather than practical reasons.

While the first leisure caravan debuted in the late 19th century and the first DIY motorhome was built in 1904, it didn't stop people from experimenting with all kinds of weird and wonderful mobile homes over subsequent decades.

This 'house car' was presented to the public in 1950 at the Concours Lépine, a French invention competition. The contraption, which can be folded up after use, was pictured alongside its inventor René Lucas.

These children were clearly happy to have their photo taken in September 1950, as they stood smiling outside a row of run-down houses in Redfern, Sydney. At the time, Britain was exporting prefabricated housing units to Australia to help ease post-war housing shortages.

As far back as the 19th century, Redfern was where new waves of migrants chose to call home. These days it's becoming increasingly gentrified, perhaps due in part to the pretty Victorian townhouses that still stand there. 

This home may look a little out of place...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 (2,286m) from the detonation site, was still standing after the explosion.  

Civil Rights activist Dr Martin Luther King Jr is pictured here at home in Atlanta, Georgia in 1960. On the left, he's seen removing a charred cross from his lawn, while his two-year-old son Martin Luther III looks on. The cross was one of many burned by the Ku Klux Klan outside the homes of black families throughout the city.

On the right we see the family enjoying happier times, as Dr King, his wife Coretta and their three young children play the piano together in their living room that same year. 

Women and children go about their daily lives in a newly-built housing project in Bogotá, Colombia during the 1960s. The small homes are built from brick with corrugated iron roofs and stretch as far as the eye can see up the steep, unfinished road.

Swiss architect and city planner Le Corbusier was called upon to draw up a new layout for Bogotá in 1947. Le Corbusier aimed to balance urban growth with ecological resilience by creating parks along the city's rivers to reduce flooding and increase public green spaces – an idea that seems ahead of its time, even by today's standards. Sadly, mass rioting hit the city in 1948 and the plans were never fully realised.

In 1961, Sydney suffered its heaviest November rainfall in 100 years. The deluge caused widespread damage, wrecking homes, farms, roads and shops in the western and southern areas. 

This photo shows volunteers helping to salvage furniture from flooded homes, as residents raced against the clock to rescue treasured possessions from the water. The damage caused was reported at £1 million – around £19 million ($24m) in today's money.

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.

Bright colours were all the rage in the 1960s and garish primary colours influenced everything from clothing to kitchens.

This early 60s Swedish kitchen perfectly illustrates the decade's style. Colourful glassware and ceramics sit on a red-topped table, while frilly net curtains add a soft, feminine touch. The creamy yellow cabinets complete the cheery picture – it would be almost impossible to start the day in a bad mood if this was your kitchen!

This extraordinary house in Biberach, southern Germany, is known as Schneckenhaus or 'snail shell'. Designed by architect Dieter Schmid, the home was made from several prefabricated triangular structures converging around one central column. Inside, extraordinary murals painted by Martin Heilig play with perspective and emphasise the home's shifting, dynamic nature.

The pink and white structure still stands today and looks much as it did in this 1970 photo.

Spanish singer-songwriter Julio Iglesias was snapped with his first wife Isabel at their home in Cadiz, Spain in July 1974. Despite having just released his first album in 1969, Iglesias was riding high on the wave that would eventually make him an estimated $600 million (£485m) fortune. 

The couple's interior style embraces Spanish farmhouse style, with rich red curtains, ladder-back chairs with rush seats and a classic wagon wheel chandelier hanging above the circular dining table.

Kingston is a UNESCO World Heritage site on Norfolk Island, Australia. It was first settled by the Polynesians, became a British colonial settlement in 1788 and eventually morphed into a penal colony in 1825.

The ruined building in the foreground was the Crankmill, where 100 shackled convicts milled corn as punishment. The building in the centre was the Royal Engineer's Office, while the one next to it was the double boat shed. Behind them lies the old blacksmith's compound.

The penal colony closed in 1855. This photo was taken in 1971 before several buildings were restored. Today, the site is open for tourists to explore. 

Actress Lilli Palmer left Germany in the 1930s after narrowly escaping arrest for being Jewish. In London, she met and married Rex Harrison – most famous for starring with Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady – and the couple moved to Hollywood two years later. Their film careers flourished and Palmer starred in 50 films during her lifetime.

She's pictured here in 1978, reading a script in her villa La Loma in Goldingen, Switzerland, where she moved with her second husband. Palmer continued to act and also became a successful writer and painter. She died in 1986 at the age of 71.

This wonderful photo shows a Canadian family waving to Pope John Paul II as he travels past their rural home in his custom car, sometimes called the 'Popemobile'. He was on his way to bless a fishing fleet in Flatrock, Newfoundland and Labrador in September 1984. 

Their clapboard house was typical of the area. Probably made from locally grown wood, clapboard construction was brought to Canada by European settlers and proved durable and weather-resistant in harsh climates.

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!

Life in Coober Pedy, Australia is very far from normal. Located hundreds of miles from the nearest big city and with over 4,000 hours of sunshine a year and almost no rain, it's one of the most hostile places on Earth. 

Once famed for its opal mines and now a tourist curiosity, most houses in the remote town were built underground to escape the heat. This opal miner chose bright colours and clashing prints to decorate his home, perhaps to contrast the bare earth walls and counter the subterranean gloom. 

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