The House is card number 4 of the Petit Lenormand, the thirty-six card deck read in the nineteenth-century French cartomantic tradition that took its name, after her death in 1843, from the Parisian fortune-teller Marie Anne Lenormand.
Image, meaning and playing card
The card shows a house. In the tradition its core sense is the home, the family, property and a settled private life; a stable and protective influence.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the King of Hearts, a survival of the ordinary piquet pack over which the pictorial Lenormand was laid. Lenormand cards are read less as standing symbols than in combination, each modifying the cards to either side, so that the house takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.
In the original German tradition the card is Das Haus. As House 4 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on domestic and family matters. In combination, House followed by Heart reads as a happy home or family affection, while House followed by Clouds reads as domestic trouble or an unsettled household. The House is also one of the cards most commonly used to represent the querent's own domestic situation as a whole when it appears near the significator, distinct from the Man and Woman cards, which represent the person rather than their circumstances.