There are two main groups of houses which have been excavated at Pella. The first is a row of three houses which lie nearest to the agora. These are clearly houses belonging to wealthy families: the first and third boast spectacular mosaic floors. All three are based around a peristyle, although the columns remain only for the first and third (and then only some). The second house is in many ways inferior to the other two, both in design and workmanship, but provides a useful point of comparison.

This house is the furthest on the right when facing the agora. It is also the largest and most impressive of this group of three houses. The house is Hellenistic and is structured around two peristyles.

The larger of the two peristyles has a number of rooms leading off from the court-yard. These rooms consist of andrones used for symposia reached by antechambers that open directly onto the peristyle. The floors of the andrones were decorated with figured mosaics – one of Dionysos astride a lion, and another of a lion hunt (both are no longer in situ but kept in the museum at Pella). The antechambers themselves are of considerable size, and are decorated with river-stone mosaics: one (on the west) is a geometric design; the other (on the north of the central peristyle), an impressively large room, is decorated with a ‘chequered’ lozenge design.
The columns of the second and smaller peristyle are Ionic. A number of chambers also lead off from this courtyard, and there seems to have been a second storey on the north side.
Although none of the walls in the house rise more than about a metre (and most are at floor level), there is evidence of wall painting in one of the rooms of the northern peristyle. There are also indications of renovation in the house. In particular, a raised floor made with Roman-style bricks has been added to one of the rooms leading off from the northern courtyard.
The House of Dionysos was built to impress, and this is evident not only in its decoration but also its construction. The walls were built from double blocks of dressed marble with in-fill, and attention was paid to the arrangement of each of the stone blocks to form intricate patterns in the external wall.
In contrast, the walls of the neighbouring House 2 are built from inferior stone, which are lain in single rows, and less care has been taken to dress the edges of the blocks.

Less of this house remains than of the House of Dionysos, but it was also based on a courtyard, though this time there was only a single peristyle lined with Doric columns. This house also had an upper storey.

Like the House of Dionysos, this house is decorated with lavish and fine mosaics, one of which is signed. The number and quality of mosaics uncovered in these houses has been thought to indicate that the mosaics were produced locally in Pella. The largest of the mosaics, in the central room on the north side of the peristyle, represented the Rape of Helen. The composition and detail in this piece is particularly fine, and there is a strong sense of dramatic and compositional tension between the horses who are straining to move towards the left, while Helen, already captured by Theseus, stretches back her arms to Deaneira on the right. All the mosaics in this house are made from natural river stone (rather than painted tesserae), so that their colours are muted and mellow. The mosaics at Pella also use lead strips to pick out detail, which was an important development in the technique of mosaics.

Moving south from this group of rather grand houses and on the other side of what is now the main highway between Thessalonike and Edessa, is another group of excavated houses. Much smaller and much less grand, these houses are still designed around peristyles. The walls are double blocks, but the blocks themselves are narrow, and the courtyards are small.

Another impressive feature of the town-planning at Pella is the drainage system. Beneath the streets of the city was an elaborate drainage system, which enhanced the quality of life and health of the inhabitants. Water was brought to the houses from systems of water pipes, cisterns and cleaning shafts. Drains took excess and refuse water from the houses, and emptied it into drains beside the streets which, using the slope of the hill, carried the water away.