Bella and Rose live in a Charleston Single, which is also known as a Shotgun House. Homes were built this way back when Charleston was first founded because of the heat, and because of crowding. The city is on a peninsula, and there really isn't all that much room for spreading out. (You may know that Charleston is known as the "Holy City" because there are so many old churches. So there are also laws that say no building can be taller than any of the church steeples.) So the best option for building houses was to make them long and narrow with porches on the sides. This allowed access to the breezes blowing through the alleyways. Houses were also usually painted light, pastel colors in order to reflect sunlight and supposedly keep them cooler.
This is something like what Bella and Rose's house would look like. Remember their apartment is on the top floor. It's typical these days for owners of these houses to split the floors up into separate apartments so they can collect more rent. It's expensive to own a house downtown!
Here are some other examples of Charleston Singles:
This is where Bella is running when the story first opens, and where Bella and Edward meet for the first time.
Edward also mentions that he tends to park at the Battery and run down to the Market and back. Here are a couple of pics of the Market (aka the Slave Market, but I, along with most locals, don't like to call it that). This is what it looks like on the Meeting Street side:
and the opposite end on East Bay Street:
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