I live in an older (ugly) house in Vancouver. It’s a rental, and the landlords are really good about keeping the interior functional but not at all good about making it look nice. Apart from sending someone round to cut down the grass up front during the summer, nothing else is done. So the house (a grey clapboard looking narrow 3-story perched up on a little hill) presents a bland face to the world.

What I’d like to do is set someone I know free with some paints. I have no idea what ideas she’d come up with but I think I’d like a combination of the modes below.  The idea that a house should present a face to the world that says something about its dwellers seems deeply right to me. I wonder if I just paid for the supplies whether the landlords would get all huffy or they’d be like “wow, that’s cool.”  I mean really, the house is of less value than the land it sits on and I suspect that someday the house will get torn down and rebuilt for someone who is upwardly mobile in an deeply economic sense. And it occurs to me to wonder, if they painted their home with iconic representations of personhood, what would it look like?