Saturday, December 30, 2006

Showing Their True Colors

My hometown is Fort Worth TX. It was not exactly at the bleeding edge of avant-garde architecture or design, especially in the 1950s. Thus, when I was growing up, all I ever saw was the most plain, vanilla styles of homes imaginable. They were all earth tones or pale off-white colors, occasionally tinted with very light pastel blues, greens or yellows. It wasn't quite as gray as the Kansas depicted in Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, but it was getting there.

I've lived in Ann Arbor MI since 1975. It is rather a different kind of place from my home town. For example, it is very much a college town, being the home of the University of Michigan. One grows used to seeing somewhat wild bits of external 'ornamentation' with student housing. Certainly, college students typically show a great deal less inhibition when it comes to the choice of the paint colors that they use.

However, I live over a mile from the nearest concentration of off-campus housing. Almost everything around my house for a number of blocks is ordinary, single-family dwellings. Still, these homes are not uniformly bland. In fact, they sometimes manifest a kind of ... daring? creativity? damaged sense of the aesthetic? Whatever it is, here in my supposedly more conventional part of town one can find some very interesting choices for exterior color.

I drove around for about twenty minutes a few days ago, taking photos of some of these unusual paint choices. I didn't go further than about ten blocks from my house. These photos do not do justice to the sharp oddity of the color choices I'm talking about. In bright sunlight they are especially striking. Unfortunately we here in Michigan have now entered into that season of the year that is more akin to the climate of Mordor, i.e., cold and perpetually gray and gloomy. My poor digital camera simply cannot bring out the richness of the colors. You'll just have to take my word for it.

Nevertheless, it is with great pleasure that I present to you ... [drumroll] ...

The True Colors Of Ann Arbor!

The lady who owned this house wanted to know why I was taking a picture of it. I told her that I loved the color. She looked doubtful but let me go without further comment.






This house is what one is compelled to call 'mustard plug yellow'. That is, it is exactly the color of the dried mustard one finds on a squeeze-type mustard bottle that has been sitting out all day at a hot-dog stand.





The purple color this photo really has a kind of electric (shocking?) quality in the bright sun.







This place is sort of a bright, little girl pink. (By that comparison, of course, I do not in any way want to disparage the color choices of little girls. It's just non-typical, if not downright odd.)






The oddness of this teal color, or whatever it is, doesn't come through here at all. However, it is enough to make you do a double-take when you drive by.






This is another head-turner, and it's on the same street, if memory serves. It's not quite a fire-engine red, but more of a Faygo Red Pop kind of red.






My son Dave worked last summer for one of those 'College Pro Painter' kinds of outfits. This is one of the houses they did. Dave and his fellow painters were much amused by the owner's choice of colors, which they characterized as Christmas red and green.





Near our house is a path leading through some woods to an adjoining neighborhood. When you come out of the woods, this is what you see. It is sometimes enough to make you wonder whether you should turn around and go back.





We pass this house very frequently, since it is on one of the two routes into our neighborhood. It's hard to say exactly what color it is. It's not quite salmon, nor is it quite peach. I asked my daughter what color she thought it was. She looked at it, and immediately said "Ugly."




This house is actually not easily visible much of the year because of foliage. However, once the trees and bushes drop their leaves, you can see it from Pontiac Trail, which is one of the thoroughfares leading through our part of town. I guess you'd call it a kind of light purple. Sort of. Maybe not.




My wife said this was 'green apple'. Maybe, but none of the green apples I've ever seen were fluorescent.







One has to wonder why people chose colors like these. Perhaps they feel that they are expressing their individuality or their non-conformity. Maybe they got a really good deal on the color at the paint store. Of course, they could simply be trying to make their house unmistakeable ("You, can't miss my house. It glows in the dark.") We will probably never know.

This is America. Apart from whatever limits local zoning ordinances may mandate, you are free to paint your house whatever color you want. However, the rest of us are free to marvel at your choice, and maybe snicker, at least to ourselves.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Another factor in housing colors is Home Owner Associations. HOAs have a tendency to limit creativity of that kind, since it can disrupt the look of a neighborhood. I'm sure there are no HOAs in your neighborhood!
E

Wile E Quixote said...

I sure have seen no evidence of anything like an HOA around there. However, I do know about individual homeowners who were mad enough at their neighbors to have used the local zoning codes as weapons in their disputes. For example, my brother-in-law Joe once wanted to replace his chain-link fence with a wood slat fence. One of the neighbors complained because 'the slats were too close together, and blocked air flow'. Unbelievably, there actually were provisions about this air flow requirement in the code, so Joe actually had to remove slats and re-space them. I think that was one of the last straws that pushed him to leave A2 and move to Minnesota. A mean neighbor can make life just as difficult as a hostile HOA.

On a related note, my sister put up a two-story storage structure in her yard in Fort Worth TX. Neighbors who apparently resented the structure because it 'blocked their view' cast about for something to fight back with and realized that the structure, which otherwise was entirely within code, was six inches too close to the fence. They complained, and the city sent another inspector out. My sister ended up paying hundreds of dollars more to move the structure six inches. She took care not to move it any further than that.

In the other direction, I learned from my brother Bob that his city, Houston TX, has no zoning codes whatsoever. The results are pretty interesting. You can make a residential home into, say, a restaurant or a garage. However, the neighborhoods I've seen in my last few visits there were not unattractive. Perhaps peer pressure helps keep things in line.

marylea said...

Colorblindness... I am so amused at your post, and delighted that you took the time to photograph and then support your claims in color! Wonderful piece of writing and local journalism!