Bright streets

All the colours in the paintbox show up in Vancouver's Commercial Drive area. There's yellow....
(Photos by John Denniston.)

... and purple.... 

...and blue with pink trim.

 Blue houses, sunshine-yellow houses, green houses and purple ones – why not? There’s a sense of fun in the side streets off Commercial Drive, where John and I went Saturday in our latest search for unfamiliar walking territory.  Besides the Easter-egg colours, there are murals, fences made of sticks, a piano mouldering in the front yard of a house about to be demolished, and a willingness to mix big and small, old and new, and even fill a lot with one long (lilac-coloured) box containing eight dwelling units.

Driving home after our adventure, I started seeing my neighbourhood through new eyes. I love Dunbar, with its spacious lots, wide boulevards and treed streets, but why are all the houses grey, black, beige or white? The older houses still offer some diversity, but they’re rapidly being replaced by huge new ones, all cast from the same one or two solemn moulds. Where is the variety, where is the fun?

Then we drove up to our house, which is a plain off-white. If I really wanted an adventure, the next paint job would be hot pink.

Two colours, one building. This duplex looks like two separate houses because of the dramatically different colour schemes -- one yellow, one green. 

On the green side, someone has made a fence from the kind of sticks that seem to accumulate in any garden.

An affordable housing solution that fits into the neighbourhood?  Build one long box and divide it into eight units, then paint it lilac. It has to be cheaper than the elaborate townhouses being built elsewhere in the city.

A three-storey house with a two-storey laneway house will be built on this lot, according to the zoning information sign. We don't know what will happen to the piano.

Murals are part of the Commercial Drive scene. This was just off the main street. 

A classic old house, beautifully painted and maintained, kind of says it all about this area of Vancouver.