German Houses

If you've read some of our earlier blogs you saw pictures of our house here in Germany. It's a pretty typical home; white stucco/plaster exterior, red terracotta tile roof. Very well built and solid.

Back in Texas, our home is in a housing development called Highland Meadows in the city of Colleyville, part of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex. It's a very nice community but very different from here in Germany. In Highland Meadows we have a homeowners association that establishes rules for the appearance of houses and yards. This is, of course, an effort to ensure that property values in the development steadily increase. We have an architectural committee that must approve certain building additions and materials to be used. So, even though each house is different, these building rules can result in the homes looking very much like the next the one. One reoccurring issue is the color of the roofing material used on the homes in our Texas housing development. The roof nazis on our architectural committee, within the established rules, maintain a strict adherence to the requirement that roofing materials must have a weathered wood or slate color. Strangely, that does not include brown and of course, doesn't include red, blue, yellow or any other colors. It's gotta be some shade of gray. So, the roofs all pretty much look the same. The exteriors, most are a red brick veneer, pretty much look the same. So the houses in Highland Meadows, overall, pretty much look the same.

Back to Germany. Although the actual design of homes can be quite similar, Germans are happy to use different colors, sometimes quite drastically, to make their home look unique. Here's a few examples that would drive our Texas architectural committee totally crazy.

A simple blue but even that's a bit shocking.



They like yellows. This one is very agreeable.



Another shade of yellow. Kind of a lemon custard.



I call this color YIKES Yellow. Notice the boxy object in front of the red car. That's a cigarette machine. There'll be a blog on that later.



Light pink.



Hot pink.



Orange sherbet.



Orange outrageous.



An agreeable green.



A really raucous red.



Here's one last house. He couldn't make up his mind what color to go with. Jeff says he likes that round window. Says every time he looks at it he thinks it would be such a great place to aim on a strafing pass. A-10 guys, always so practical.



Now all those colors would just make the skin crawl on the members of our architectural committee back in Texas. But this one, good grief, would give those roof nazis a heart attack. Not a blue roof!!