The hall house is a type of vernacular house traditional in many parts of England, Wales, Ireland and lowland Scotland, as well as northern Europe, during the Middle Ages, centring on a hall. Usually timber-framed, some high status examples were built in stone.

Unaltered hall houses are almost unknown. Where they have survived, they have almost always been significantly changed and extended by successive owners over the generations.

In Old English, a "hall" is simply a large room enclosed by a roof and walls, and in Anglo-Saxon England simple one-room buildings, with a single hearth in the middle of the floor for cooking and warmth, were the usual residence of a lord of the manor and his retainers. The whole community was used to eating and sleeping in the hall. This is the hall as Beowulf understood it. Over several centuries the hall developed into a building which provided more than one room, giving some privacy to its more important residents.

A significant house needs both public and private areas. The public area is the place for living: cooking, eating, meeting and playing, while private space is for withdrawing and for storing valuables. A source of heat is required, and in northern latitudes walls are also needed to keep the weather out and to keep in the heat. By about 1400, in lowland Britain, with changes in settlement patterns and agriculture, people were thinking of houses as permanent structures rather than temporary shelter. According to the locality, they built stone or timber-framed houses with wattle and daub or clay infill. The designs were copied by their neighbours and descendants in the tradition of vernacular architecture. They were sturdy and some have survived over five hundred years. Hall houses built after 1570 are rare.

The open hearth found in a hall house created heat and smoke. A high ceiling drew the smoke upwards, leaving a relatively smoke-free void beneath. Later hall houses were built with chimneys and flues. In earlier ones, these were added as alterations and additional flooring often installed. This, and the need for staircases to reach each of the upper storeys, led to much innovation and variety in floor plans. The hall house, having started in the Middle Ages as a home for a lord and his community of retainers, permeated to the less well-off during the early modern period. During the sixteenth century, the rich crossed what Brunskill describes as the "polite threshold" and became more likely to employ professionals to design their homes.

In its earliest and simplest form the medieval hall house would be a four-bay cruck-framed structure, with the open hall taking up the two bays in the middle of the building. An open hearth would be in the middle of the hall, its smoke rising to a vent in the roof. Two external doors on each side of the hall formed a cross passage. One end bay at the "screens end" or "lower end" of the hall would contain two rooms commonly called the pantry, used for storing food, and the buttery used for storing drink. These were intentionally unheated. The rooms in the "upper end" bay formed the private space. This layout was analogous to that found in the great houses of the day, the difference being merely that of scale.

The rooms on the ground floor of the private space, were often known as parlours while the upper floor provided rooms called solars. The upper rooms would be reached in the simplest buildings by means of a ladder or steep companionway. The solars often stretched beyond the outer wall of the ground floor rooms, jettying out at one end or else at both ends of the building. As the hall itself had no upper floor within it, its outer walls always stood straight, without jettying.

Here a two-storey wing is attached to one end of the hall. This can project beyond one side wall or both side walls of the hall, or sometimes just the upper storey is jettied beyond the side wall. There were multiple solutions as to where the staircase was placed.