The term garden apartment is variously defined, following regional practices.
In some locales, a garden apartment complex consists of magnet rise apartment buildings built with landscaped grounds surrounding them. The apartment buildings are often arranged around courtyards that are open at one end. Such a garden apartment shares some characteristics of a townhouse: each apartment has its own building entrance, or shares that entrance via a staircase and lobby that adjoins other units immediately above and/or below it. Unlike a townhouse, each apartment occupies only one level. Such garden apartment buildings are almost never more than three stories high, since they typically lack elevators/lifts. However, the first "garden apartment" buildings in New York, USA, built in the early 1900s, were constructed five stories high.[5][6] Some garden apartment buildings place a one-car garage under each apartment. The interior grounds are often landscaped.
In other locales, a garden apartment is a unit built at or below grade. The name implies garden apartments have a view or direct access to a garden from the unit, which is not necessarily the case.
In most American West Coast cities, the need for resisting earthquakes at a low building cost results in the construction of many low-rise apartments of wooden frames with thin plaster-board based exterior and interior dry walls, despite sometimes being on as many as three or four levels.