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I am quoting from the Return of Sherlock Holmes, The Six Napoleons, by Arthur Conan Doyle:
In half an hour we had reached Pitt Street, a quiet little backwater just beside one of the briskest currents of London life. No. 131 was one of a row, all flat-chested, respectable, and most unromantic dwellings. As we drove up we found the railings in front of the house lined by a curious crowd. Holmes whistled.
So what do 'flat-chested' and 'unromantic' mean when speaking of a house?
I visualise the houses as having a perfectly flat façade with no decorative porches, balconies or bay windows; unromantic in the sense of being perfectly dull and ordinary.
I agree entirely with KateBunting's reading of the passage, but some further explanation might be interesting ...
The usual application of flat-chested is to women; for example, Cambridge Dictionary defines "flat-chested" by saying "A woman who is flat-chested has small breasts" [link]. The Oxford English Dictionary gives three citations of "flat-chested" (under the headword flat), all applied to women, the latest dated to 1939.
As the terms respectable and unromantic would also, at the time Sir Arthur was writing, have been regularly applied to women-as-viewed-by-men, we might read the whole expression "one of a row, all flat-chested, respectable, and most unromantic dwellings" as a metaphor, drawing a parallel between women and houses.
And then, at the end of the passage Holmes whistled. Tut tut.
I agree with Kay Bunting, but here I think "flat-chested" specifically means lacking bay windows.
In Britain in general, and London in particular, bay windows are a common feature of houses. They are both slightly more expensive to build, and also create a roundish protrusion from the house.
This means that usually, houses which front directly onto the street, having no front yard, usually do not have bay windows (because they would protrude into the street, which is public property).
So this indicates in a roundabout way that the houses
This figure of speech "flat chested" draws a direct simile with a woman's breasts, which connects figuratively with "unromantic".
We might today consider this a sexist comparison.
I read that using my antiquated/extremely-sexist-colored glasses.
In it, Holmes reached a neighborhood of plain, boring, unattractive but perhaps functional houses. If you live in a place with housing stock that ranges from modern to 100-year-old houses, sometimes you see houses with Victorian flourishes, sometimes with interesting brick patterns, sometimes with decorative windows, and sometimes with an array of roof gables.
But sometimes what you see is a row of the most boring possible designed houses: Say plain clapboard, a door, a couple of windows and a flat roof. The whole house was painted white at some point, but now it's just a dingy grey.
I lived in a romantic Victorian in the 1990s in Rhode Island (lots of gables, a window bay that worked over two stories, and a tower). I could walk a few blocks and see, uh, "flat-chested, unromantic" houses.
It's a sexist-adjacent way to say the houses project forwards an uninspiringly minimal degree of three-dimensional structure while simultaneously featuring no significant artistic flourishes. Think: the typical American suburban duplex, built by capitalists, not craftsmen.
It also might imply you can't tell from the front whether these houses might have big back yards.
