Color
It’s not just pink. It’s Rosewater, Broadmoor Rose and Victorian Heath.
Originally built in the same style as its Plaza-Midwood neighbors, it’s hard to believe this pink lady used to be an off-yellow bungalow. The bay window in the front, a balcony on the second floor and the tower with eight stain-glass windows were added in 2000. Everyone asks owner Rhonda Reading what’s in the tower, and she tells them she’s not imprisoning a princess. Reading is frequently approached by excited little girls about her house, who call it Barbie Dream House or the Doll House. “They think it’s going to be like a princess castle inside. They want to come inside, and I tell them they might be disappointed,” says Reading. To her face, only one stranger has objected to the aesthetic of her abode. “The only other person who doesn’t like it is my son,” says Reading.
Most of Mark Englander’s orange, yellow and blue Baldwin Avenue home, which looks like a gingerbread home, was made out of recycled materials. He fished the tiles out of dumpsters. The flooring came from six different houses. A builder friend told him where he could get parts from a recently bulldozed house.
Englander himself has an interesting past in Charlotte. He ran for mayor as the labor party candidate against John Belk in the 1970s, was one of the first people in the city to try to bring public radio here and was arrested for crashing Billy Graham’s birthday party during the Vietnam War. His alternative energy store down the street, with corn planted in the front, used to be a convenience store known as the best place in Charlotte for a 14-year-old to buy beer. Of his color selection, Englander says: “My wife asked me if I was mad at her.”
Shape
The geodesic dome has been called the UFO home by a local real estate agent. Denver builder/owner Ray Young seemed compelled to build a dome, just because he could. The idea came from a friend of Young’s in Alabama who constructed the same style with a radial arm saw and some blueprints he bought. Young also purchased a dome home kit and spent three years in construction. “If that fellow could do that, surely I could put one together. So that’s what I did.”
Shingles are plastered to the exterior. Inside the dome, large triangles with legs the height of people form pentagons and hexagons on the walls. Natural light pours in from large pentagonal skylights. There are other dome homes in the Charlotte area, though Young says not all are flawlessly constructed like his. One dome home in Huntersville has a miniature dome garage on the side. Young’s 1,726 square foot home is on sale, listed for $170,000.
Artist and sculptor Theron Ross has another unconventional structure inside his studio: a yurt. Always fascinated with the Mongolian-design tent, he bought the $12,000, 20-foot structure (purchased on eBay) as a refuge from his noisy studio. “We get so used to living in square spaces,” Ross says. “There’s four corners in a square space. It’s hard to find something to do with all of them. There’s no wasted space in this.”
Other Weirdness
The roof is the only thing you can see of this home driving by on Nevin Road. It’s body is underground. Mecklenburg County tax appraiser Chuck Hicks speculates the concept was a “novel energy efficient design of the ’70s.” Currently, the house has holes in the roof and is gutted and abandoned. Among the mansions on Fairview Road used to be another cool pad. Water slides were connected from the bedrooms to a rectangular, aquarium-like swimming pool. Hicks described it as something out of the Playboy Mansion. The slides have since been taken out and the aquarium-like pool is now a real aquarium.
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2006.
