When rereading the canon for chronology reasons, you also notice references to the layout of rooms in Baker Street. Most of the time Watson's room is referred to as upstairs, while Holmes's room is on the same floor as the sitting-room (i.e. seventeen steps above ground floor). However, this is not consistent, because in the "Beryl Coronet", Holmes goes to his "chamber" upstairs, then returns in disguise. In "Thor Bridge", Watson says that he can see a solitary plane tree in the backyard, so his bedroom is presumably in the back of the house, not the front. In "Black Peter" Holmes has two sailor guys wait "in the next room" so he can prevent them from going downstairs again and warning away the killer he intends to capture. But does Holmes mean his own bedroom next door? Surely Holmes wouldn't invite random people to walk into his bedroom and use it as a waiting room? (Watson offers to wait in "the next room" in The Red-Headed League" but he's not a stranger.) Holmes's room is not like a normal bedroom, what with its pictures of criminals on the walls, and it's probably as big a mess as the sitting room. So what is this, an extra room? Or, *gasp* has Holmes moved upstairs, nearer to Watson and converted his previous room into something more nondescript? Hmm...
Another example is Russell Stutler's floor plan, which he's done 3 versions of over the years. I bought a copy of the 2nd version, which I think has been featured in several Holmes publications. Stutler helpfully wrote up all the details in the canon which describe the Baker Street rooms. His final plan seems to show that Holmes's bedroom has 3 separate doors, one from the sitting room, one from a secret set of stairs going to the street, and one to the little curtained alcove in "The Mazarin Stone." That's an astonishing amount of doors for a bedroom. Though I applaud his effort to be complete, it seems unrealistic and bizarre to me.
Besides, all these floor plans have the same problem, that they are not deep enough for a building in Baker Street. I recently found a different floorplan (apparently from a law firm's website) which takes into account the whole building, not just these couple of rooms.
This guy argues convincingly that previous diagrams don't realize that these buildings would be narrow and several rooms deep. He also posits light shafts, and argues about bay windows versus bow windows. The only flaw I can see in his logic is that he shows 4 rooms that are "rented to other tenant" in the building, and that's not counting the ground floor rooms, which he says are usually rented out to businesses. But what other tenants are there in 221? Watson never mentions anyone else. Even if there were tenants at one time, you'd think they'd quickly leave due to Holmes's awful habits like firing guns indoors. Plus the whole idea that the sitting room only belongs to Holmes and Watson, while none of the other tenants have access to it, seems weird. And why wouldn't Watson get the other bedroom close to the sitting room? I know this is a fault of Conan Doyle's text, that he keeps referring to Watson's bedroom upstairs, but to me it's most logical for Mrs. Hudson to rent out 2 bedrooms and a sitting room as a set, if they are all adjacent to each other. (And for those who think Watson has a wounded leg, surely they shouldn't force him to walk up an additional flight of stairs if it's unnecessary.)
In my opinion, those 4 other rooms need to belong to someone else, perhaps Mrs. Hudson's servants such as the maid and Billy the page boy. Maybe the mysterious Mrs. Turner if she's a cook or housekeeper. Or maybe all those rooms became "lumber rooms" or storage, while the servants lived on another floor above. *shrug* Also, in the "Naval Treaty", Holmes tells Watson to have Percy Phelps stay the night in "the spare bedroom" in Baker Street, and as he told Watson to "[remain] with him until I see you again", he's suggesting that Watson stay the night too, instead of going home to his wife. So does Holmes mean, "you stay in your own room and let Percy have my bedroom" or "you let Percy have your old room, and you can sleep in mine" or does he mean there's actually a third, spare bedroom? Yet if there is a third bedroom available, why didn't Holmes offer it up to Stanley Hopkins in the "Golden Pince-Nez" instead of making him sleep on the couch? It's quite a three-pipe problem.
Edited to add, Stutler is already aware of the terraced house floorplan from 2017, but he argues that 221 is not a terraced house.
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