[RV] Well, originally, the exterior of the house which was, and is stucco, you apply a colour to it then, it’s not the natural colour of the material, and originally it was not white, which it probably would have been if I’d been a normal or typical architect of the time, in that Modernist, purist Modernist period.  And it was a kind of analogous, it wasn’t buff, it was kind of an analogous, warm grey, with maybe a touch of mauve in it, and I liked the colour and my mother liked it. I should get back to the part where my mother is client.  But I liked it, and then a couple of years later I was sitting in the library at Yale where I was teaching, and reading a magazine, and in it I saw a quote from the architect…

[DSB] Marcel Breuer.

[RV] Marcel Breuer, a proper Modernist who was then Head of the Department at Yale, who said, you never use green as a colour on the outside of the house. And my immediate reaction was, I’m going to change the house to green.

[DSB] So you see, Bob’s a contrarian from the get go.

[RV] You learn a lot from, sort of, these rules that tell you what you should not do. Sometimes the rules are right, of course. And so I went back and then over the years this green has varied as it gets repainted. There was one period where I didn’t like the green very much, but anyhow it’s back to a green, which I do like, although even now, you know, architects are never… they’re never completely satisfied with what they do. Even now, I would say, I like the green the way it is, but maybe it should be just a little lighter and a little more buffy; a little less explicitly green. But that’s all right, I’m happy. And I think in a way it was nice, because the house was relatively bold as you see it as form, and it’s rather nice to make it kind of analogous to its green-like setting, which is a lawn and trees in a suburb.