Open letter to owners of vintage brick rotunda:

Dear Owners of Vintage Brick Rotunda in Bonnie Brae neighborhood,

I passed by your house on my bicycle a few days past, and was admiring the way you have celebrated the bricklaying flair of early 1900s home-builders. In a world of scrapes and pops, you have embraced your grainy brick heritage, replete with quaint steepled facets and a leafy canopy of elderly deciduous trees. Nearby houses squat fatly on tiny blocks like overfed pets, barking feebly from their beds to be brought another treat. Their approximations of Dorian, Mediterranean and Gallic architecture are abominations of design and function. Their faux galleys and faux mosaics indict their owners; at night the fulsome glow of lights in cavernous, empty rooms lets all who pass know that the house cannot be saved, that it has been seized by ill-taste, that ill-will toward all other men is resident. One day I hope to pass by the fortress up my street and see a resident examining the "antique" globe he has placed within view of the street on an empty set of bookshelves, under an "antique" Pottery Barn chandelier which remains on 24 hours a day.

So on seeing your honest abode, I took heart. Look! I said to myself. An artifact! Owners taking pride in their inheritance of a dwelling that precedes them, and that will outlast them, no doubt. They even have a delightful replica of their own house to serve as mailbox. Their house is something of a very large Matryoshka doll. I peered a while longer at your mailbox.

Ho. I thought. There appears to be an incongruous element in the likeness. The charming pointy parlor at left, seen in mailbox form as a triangular replica of the front of the house, appears to have been replaced with a round pod of newer brick in the scheme of the larger house. It was then the raspy whiff of renovation stung my nostrils. They didn't have circular spirit levels in 1900!

I can only imagine why you found perpendicular walls so disagreeable. Perhaps you had a wealth of concave artwork and nowhere to hang it; perhaps you have bent every aspect of your existence to one-upping your relatives at Christmas this year - 360 degrees of baubles in a designated tree room should do it! - perhaps you've invented the first room-size Lazy Susan. I don't know. I don't know what you're doing in that odd rotunda, or why anywhere up to 70 percent of Bonnie Brae residences have one of them. All I know is that it is historically inaccurate, and it doesn't match your letterbox.

Clearly, one of them will have to change.


Regards,

Your Neighbor