A half-timbered house is usually an old one whose wooden frame shows on the outside walls — dark beams in a pattern, with plaster or brick filling the spaces in between. You see this a lot on old European streets, especially the Tudor look in England: the wood is the skeleton, and it is meant to be seen. Though actually, the “half” does not mean the house is fifty percent wood, like a recipe. It means the building is not timber all the way through. The timber is the frame; the rest of the wall is filled with something else. So half-timbered is “partly timber,” not “exactly half.” People use it in travel writing and when they talk about old buildings. You would not call a modern concrete apartment half-timbered just because it has a wooden balcony.