Linearbandkeramik (LBK) buildings are among the most monumental domestic structures created in prehistory and are fundamental for understanding the social life, cosmology and historical trajectory of central Europe’s first farmers. This paper approaches the characteristic longhouses as frameworks for living, comparing the houses of the LBK and its various successor cultures in terms of their affordances for daily life, the way they structured settlement space, how they framed routine activities such as discard, and the kinds of groupings they could have sheltered. Also discussed are how houses related to other contemporary structures, and to predecessors and successors as part of wider genealogical schemes. In this way, it can be shown that houses were flexible aspects of social life which played a fundamental part in negotiating the transition from the early to the middle Neolithic.