Home UpNorman 7: Other Residential Ideas

Yes, there are alternatives to the Dallas House.

How about some Victorian cuteness, like this doll house at a 50:1 scale. It's on a Norman street called Carriage Lane, where every house must satisfy what amounts to a quaintness covenant.

Across the street: a windowless turret. Call it an elevated dungeon.

Food for thought. Could it have been designed for a retired bishop?

Less than a mile away and on an arterial street leading to the University of Oklahoma campus, an apartment building from the 1960s is given a false front to confer a modicum of status.

Another apartment complex, here with a laundry room topped up with a clock tower. Must be so tenants don't leave their clothes in the drier.

Up the road a couple of miles, another clock tower at another apartment complex. There's no clock, but Rapunzel leans out the window Mondays at 11. Everyone sets the watch by her, or pretends to.

More expensive districts play the same game. Here some brick townhouses (translation: they have no backyards) share a kiosk on a bit of public space. It is a fact universally acknowledged that no human being has even been seen in this kiosk.

Garages in this neighborhood are approached through back alleys that have more traffic than the streets. There are no commercial enterprises within the subdivision, no schools, no public buildings. People seen on foot here may not be arrested, but it's chancy. Best to walk a dog.

A corner house in the same subdivision.

Where's the band?

Close to the university campus, a swimming pool goes in the back yard of a house. It needs to have a security wall, and the owner sets about this task with a vengeance.

Do good fences really make good neighbors? Not in this case, you can bet.

A more civil attempt. This is Sutton Woods, built in 1982 and echoing the Woodslawn Development of the 1950s. The lake is shared by surrounding homeowners. On the principle of bowling alone, few of them use the barbecue shed at one end; some have proposed filling the lake in.

Close to the pond, a surprisingly modern home, property of a Broadway producer with Oklahoma roots. As of 2002, it was being demolished to make way for a much grander pile.

A close-up. While it lasted, it might have qualified for a spread in Architectural Digest.

Just southeast of town, a relatively inexpensive experiment in modernism.

Facade.

There are no carpets or shades or drapes; the only concession to modesty is sand-blasted panels in the bedroom windows.

Everything in the house is hard, including the acid-treated concrete floors.

Bathroom sink.