How Giant White Houses Took Over America

''You’d be forgiven, driving through my part of Arlington, if you thought you had stumbled into a monochromatic alternate reality—Pleasantville, before the color arrives. The houses really are all black and white. The facades are blinding, like the freshly capped teeth of a Hollywood star. The accents are depthless, burnished black: black railings enclosing white porches, black drainpipes crawling down white walls, black trim delineating white window frames. The windows themselves are so reflective they, too, read as black in the blank white face of the house. The house numbers: black, and sans serif.