The people of Pompeii generally lived in one of two types of buildings: houses and insulae.  The former tended to be organized along some variation of the atrium-tablinum-hortus/peristyle layout, while the latter has been characterized essentially as an apartment block.  The thing is, neither of these, but especially houses, were necessarily limited to just the family in terms of who could or did live there.
 
It’s very difficult, nearly impossible even, to find evidence of these sorts of arrangements in apartments, but it’s a little easier to figure out with houses.  It seems to have been not uncommon for house owners to rent out a room or rooms on the upper floor as living spaces, most likely to freedpersons and clients.  Being on the upper floor more easily separated the rented space from family space.  If the rooms were at the very front of the house, an external staircase could even be added to allow easy access from the street.  People living in rooms further back in the house, on the other hand, would have to go into the house and through the atrium.
 
Staircases in Pompeii mostly didn’t survive, though a few did in Herculaneum.  In Pompeii many upper floors didn’t survive either, making it harder for archaeologists to determine which rooms might have been rented out.  The easiest way to find such spaces, especially at Herculaneum, is to look for a separate hearth.  Rooms that are structurally part of the house but only open onto the street and not the house might be separate living spaces, but if they’re on the ground floor they might also just be a shop.  Or both.  Another possible, though less definitive indicator are the secondary reception rooms Wallace-Hadrill finds in his study of Pompeiian houses.
 
As Wallace-Hadrill argues, houses were not necessarily just “family” homes.  They could, and sometimes did, hold multiple, unrelated households in secondary spaces.

Sources/Further Reading:
Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew. "Houses and Households: Sampling Pompeii and Herculaneum." In Marriage, Divorce, and Children in Ancient Rome, edited by Beryl Rawson, 191-227. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

As in any community, the members of a beguinage built a variety of relationships among themselves. Some beguines joined with family members or found a community where they already had family; others lived with their children.  Strong friendships were, unsurprisingly, also very common and were perhaps the most diverse set of relationships within these communities.

Houses like these (not the church in the middle) would have held a few beguines each.
[Begijnhof Diksmuide, photographed in 2004 by Willemdd, source: Wikimedia Commons]

There was also a trend of beguines who moved from outside the city and had moved there to find work collected in groups according to where they had grown up.  Specifically female immigration to the cities was quite common in the 12th and 13th century Low Countries, so the high number of houses within the great court beguinages that were named for the home villages of their inhabitants should come as no surprise.

It was also common to see sisters living together.  Other familial relationships could also be found:  aunts and nieces, cousins, or even mothers and daughters (or granddaughters).  Many of these daughters and granddaughters may not have been or intended to become beguines when they moved to the beguinage.  Many beguinages allowed new members to bring their underage children to live with them, or even to give birth there if they were already pregnant.*  A not insignificant number of these children went on to become beguines themselves.

Courtyards like this one would have been ideal for a group of beguines working together.
[Begijnhof, Amsterdam, photographed in 2011 by Jensre, source: Wikimedia Commons]

The way life in a beguinage was structured made it easy for beguines to form lasting friendships.  Not only did they live in community, many of them worked in together in the large courtyards and held discussions as they did so.**  These women lived together and left property to each other in their wills.  Some even wished to share a grave.

The beguines as a collective were once or twice accused of having sex with each other and a few individuals were punished for it, but exactly how many of their friendships were romantic and/or sexual in nature remains unknown.  Certainly some of them had to have been.  These communities fostered a wide variety of close relationships among their members, which in some ways was their great strength.  Their lower level of official organization was countered by the strong bonds among their members.



*It is likely that this mostly applied to women who had gotten pregnant through marriage, but it is likely that in cases where there was no proof, the mother’s word was believed.  A woman who fell pregnant after having become a beguine was generally removed from the community, but most beguinages allowed for her to be readmitted after a year if she showed good behaviour.  She was presumably allowed to bring the child with her.
**Supposedly these were theological in nature, but it would be surprising if they stuck entirely to that subject.  More on this here.
***Of particular note here is Walter of Coincy who, I kid you not, uses grammar to prove it his accusations against them.  It’s worth quoting here: “They join hic with hic without discrimination, like grammar does; but Nature condemns such a coupling.  …Nature rejoices, it seems to me, when hic couples with haec: but hic and hic bewilders Nature.  She beats her fists and wrings her hands.”  [Found in Simons, Cities of Ladies, pg. 124]

Sources/Further Reading:
Simons, Walter. Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
Simons, Walter. “‘Staining the Speech of Things Divine’: the Uses of Literacy in Medieval Beguine Communities.” In The Voice of Silence: Women’s Literacy in a Men’s Church, edited by Thérèse de Hemptinne and Maria Eugenia Góngora, 85-110. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2004.

Maps.  Maps are cool.
[Map locating Chalkidiki in Greece, source: Wikimedia Commons]
[Map of Ancient Chalkidiki, 1923, source: Wikimedia Commons]

One of the major archaeological sources in the study of Ancient Greek domestic architecture (houses, in other words) is the ruins of Olynthos, a city of Chalkidiki in northeastern Greece.  It seems an odd place to have such prominence, being so far from any of the major cities, but its history gives it numerous advantages as a source.

Unfortunately, this map doesn't show the street plan of the South Hill.
[Map of Olynthos in Nevett, Lisa C. House and Society in the Ancient Greek World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.]

The southwestern part of Olynthos grew organically; its haphazard street plan shows its origins.  The rest of the city, however, shows far more planning and far more regularity.  In 432 BCE the inhabitants of several towns in the region banded together and moved to Olynthos for protection a few years before the Peloponnesian War.  Houses had to be built quickly in order to shelter the city’s new inhabitants.  Just under a century later, Phillip II of Macedon conquered the city, razed it to the ground, and sold those inhabitants he caught into slavery.  Small portions of the city were briefly resettled, but the rest was totally abandoned.

As a result of the city’s rapid expansion, all of the houses in the newer part of the city seem to have been based on the same basic plan, giving us some idea of what was commonly accepted as typical layout of a Greek house, though many people took the opportunity to alter their houses to suit their own purposes.  The city’s rapid fall and abandonment meant that though the walls do not survive, their foundations do, giving us the layout of at least the ground floor.*  It also meant that many personal and practical items were left near where people used or stored them, giving us some idea of what people actually did in various parts of the house.

There are, however, several problems with Olynthos as a source.  Its rapid fall also means that many people would have tried to hide valuable or extremely personal items while others simply ran off with them.  Additionally, the city is in the northeast, far from other important cities in Greece, and the very small number of ancient houses uncovered elsewhere makes it hard to know what regional differences there might have been.


*While we cannot know what any upper floors would have looked like, stair bases can tell us which houses had another floor and where the stairs leading up to it would have been.

Sources/Further Reading:
Nevett, Lisa C. “Gender Relations in the Classical Greek Household: The Archaeological Evidence.” The Annual of the British School at Athens 90 (1995): 363-381.
Nevett, Lisa C. House and Society in the Ancient Greek World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Olynthos - Wikipedia
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When a friend of mine told me she was going to Amsterdam there was one thing I told her to do: visit the begijnhof.  There few many physical things still existing to day (besides their manuscripts) that we can connect to the beguines, but some of the buildings the beguines of the Low Countries lived, worked, and worshiped in still stand today and we have some evidence on those that don't.*  The buildings that served as a physical reminder of both their attachment to the world and their separation from it still remind us as well.  Beguinages or begijnhoven came in two types: courts and convents.

The begijnhof in Amsterdam is probably the best known outside of the Low Countries.
[Begijnhof, Amsterdam, photographed 2011, Source: Wikimedia Commons]

Surprisingly for a movement with such fragmentary origins, the larger court beguinages appeared first.  These were unique to the Low Countries and many of them housed between 100 and 300 beguines under a single grand magistra.**  They usually consisted of both individual houses for smaller groups of family members or close friends*** and a few “convents” where a larger group of beguines lived with their own magistra.  Some were fairly (though not fully) independent communities with their own service buildings (bakeries and such, sometimes even a small farm).  The very largest made up their own parishes.  Beguines in smaller courts attended church with the lay people.

A 17th century drawing of the Beguinage of St. Christophe in Liège.
[Crop from a 1649 map of Liège by Johan Blaeu, Source: Wikimedia Commons]

Convents tended to be much smaller, usually housing a community of 5-16 women under a magistra.  Communities like this could be found not only in the Low Countries, but also in parts of what are now France, Germany, and the Czech Republic.  Some were founded simply as communal groups of beguines, others had a more specific purpose, such as the care of the sick or the poor.****  Convents, since they did not require as many members or resources to start, were by far the more common, but their buildings tend not to have survived the centuries.

Kortrijk was the home of the last living beguine, Marcella Pattyn, who died in April 2013.
[Beguinage, Kortrijk, photographed 2009, source: Wikimedia Commons]

The buildings beguines lived (and sometimes worked) in provide a physical example of conceptual middle ground they occupied between nuns and laywomen. The slightly more enclosed spaces of the beguinage emphasized their partial separation from the city and the secular world while still allowing for their work within it.  Most of these women spent much of their time working to support themselves.  The buildings of a beguinage, court or convent, provided them with space for a semi-religious life in the company of likeminded women.


*Few if any beguinages from outside the Low Countries survive.
**Several, however, were larger.  The largest, the Groot Begijnhof in Mechelen, housed between 1500 and 1900 beguines in the 15th century, while the beguinage of St. Christophe in Liège had about 1000 beguines in the middle of the 13th century.
***Walter Simons mentions two unrelated beguines who lived out their lives together and then requested to be buried together as well.
****This was actually why some of the beguines in France survived the years after the French Revolution: they managed to get themselves classified as charities rather than religious institutions.

Sources/Further Reading:

Simons, Walter. Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Simons, Walter. “Architecture of Semi-Religiosity: the Beguinages of the Southern Low Countries, Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries.” In Shaping Community: The Art and Archaeology of Monasticism, edited by Sheila McNally, 117-128.  Oxford: Archaeopress, 2001.

Woodward, Richard. "A Lost World of Women." 13 July 2008 - New York Times
Begijnhof & Kapel Amsterdam
Flemish Beguinages - UNESCO

Beguines and Beghards - Wikipedia
Beguinage - Wikipedia (English)
Begijnhof - Wikipedia (Dutch)
Begijnhoven in Vlaanderen - Wikipedia (Dutch)
Béguinage - Wikipedia (French)
Béguinages de Liège - Wikipedia (French)