The Globe and Mail

Inside and out, the architecture of new single family houses reveals us. Touring the new subdivisions of South Surrey, then over to Port Moody and into Coquitlam, what strikes me is how utterly different house exteriors are from interiors these days. What I mean are not the obvious functional differences between keeping the rain out and providing surfaces to hang pictures of the cousins, but rather the aesthetic choices that render the public faces and the private realities of dwellings in different ways. Modern suburbia means one architecture for external walls, but an altogether different one inside, where we live. Why should this be so? Visit new Vancouver suburban houses and you will see window designs resonating with European history. For example, there are lots of Palladian windows — a rounded and raised central pane flanked by two side panes — inspired generally from Italian Renaissance maestro Andrea Palladio, but more specifically, from the 18th century English 'Palladians,' who revived window forms like these after reading Palladio's books and studying his drawings.