I found this by accident, looking for something else, but here it is for your Friday afternoon entertainment. Not that it is Friday afternoon for most of you any more, but it is for me.
Seattle for some reason I will never understand has a strong bias toward painting houses in horrible drab muddy dark dreary ugly colors. Dull greys, muddy greens, dreary browns…and that’s it. It’s annoying.
The Slog, the blog of the Stranger, ran a piece aptly titled Houses That Don’t Hate Color Like the Rest of Seattle. The first house is one I know well – it’s on the other side of the hill where I live.
Do admit.
Exactly! I’ve always hated the monotony of colors in the Puget Sound area. There’s no need to be afraid of color! My favorite restaurant here in town (Pepper Sisters, owned by two very friendly sisters and serving southwestern cuisine) is partially my favorite because it’s painted in such vibrant colors.
Here’s the preceding Slog piece complaining about it:
So right.
Oh. My. God. Beautiful.
Why on Earth isn’t every Seattle house so brilliant? Y’all NEED the colors to make up for those gawdawful long weeks of rain. Look at San Francisco for a sorta-similar environment: lots of fog and drizzle, khaki green and cypress green native vegetation — and yet, light and color everywhere in the painted Victorian Ladies.
But I admit, I live (not in SF, of course) where there’s a similar problem of drabness. We’re surrounded by pretensions of “tastefulness”. That is: capitalist drone maxim of “don’t be the nail that sticks out; you’ll get hammered down.” Boring is safer than beautiful.
Too bad.
I read somewhere that these gingerbread-style Victorians were pretty nightly colored when they first went up, though not in THIS sense… but purples etc. were supposedly common (more muted, given paint limitations of the time).
er, brightly.
You may enjoy the children’s book The Big Orange Splot by NPR’s Daniel Pinkwater. It is about this very subject.
Ok, punctuation smileys never used to go straight to emoticons on FtB, but now they seem to be doing so. I would not have put it on if I knew it was going to go all yellow button on me.
Not all North American cities have to be drab:
St. Johns, Newfoundland
San Francisco Painted Ladies
Montgomery County Public Library, Rockville, Maryland
Ophelia,
I wrote a post with three links to other painted buildings. Please take it out of hiding. Thank you.
carlie – I know; sorry. I hate that too. The yellow button is so much MORE than the colon + parenth, and one doesn’t always want more.
San Francisco is what I always think of when I wonder why Seattle thinks it has to look like this. The Painted Ladies (on the east side of Alamo Square) are a nice example but there are THOUSANDS of them in San Fran, along with thousands of stucco boxes painted a wide variety of bright, pretty colors.
The two cities aren’t exactly comparable; the light 1000 miles north is different; but if anything that just means Seattle needs color more.
Also the house pictured in the post is actually not a Victorian (gingerbread) – it was just an ordinary box when the owner bought it decades ago; he added the cupola and all the other delightful gewgaws.
The Painted Lady victorians in SF were very much associated with gay migration to the City. Might there be a homophobic taint to Seattle’s clinging to the drab?
There were a couple of painting firms that started the trend of using color to highlight the details of ornament in these houses. SOME imitators were just garish and that might account for some backlash too.
Uh, no. That’s absurd.
Mind you – on further thought – I do think it has to do with a very pinched inhibited idea of “taste” and not wanting to be vulgar and yadda yadda, and that does overlap with not liking camp and frivolity and that can overlap with homophobia (or lead into it). But it’s pretty attenuated…SF is colorful everywhere and has been forever, I think it’s a Mediterranean style much more than a camp one. Also Seattle isn’t really famous for homophobia.
I’ve never felt any kind of homophobic vibe in Seattle, but then I am not particularly attuned to it. Someone with more sensitive radar on that level might be able to say more, like perhaps Josh. West of the Cascades, people are generally fairly tolerant, with some notable exceptions (like Island County).
Ophelia – thanks for taking it out! It just feels so obnoxious having them sit there like that.
carlie, I know, I’ve done the same thing myself, and promptly removed it. I’d put a colon-P smiley here if I could, but it would just turn into beaming yellow button goon.
There’s also a concern about property values. In some neighborhoods around the country, they limit what colors you can paint your house, and many city ordinances limit certain colors because of the worry that you will cause a drop in your neighbor’s property values. Whether there is anything to that or not, I don’t know. I haven’t seen statistics on whether people are less likely to buy a house if there is a house across the street painted sky-blue pink with yellow polka dots (don’t ask me what sky-blue pink is – that was a favorite saying of my mother).
Ah yes, of course.
But that’s basically the same question in a different form. I don’t see why ugly dreary muddy light-swallowing colors would be better for property values than clear pretty light-reflecting ones. Even if neutral colors are more acceptable to buyers, they could be neutral but light – but in Seattle they’re dark. It’s a dark city, so the colors are dark – it makes no sense.
I agree with you on that, Ophelia. In our neighborhood we have a lot of yellows and greens (our own house is a light ivory color), none of which has reduced our property values in any way. In between the yellows and greens, there are the red brick to give a dash of color.
We have a lot of greens here but it’s a horrible dark muted muddy green, a green that might as well be grey.