And because hurricanes tend to blow in every few years and destroy older homes, more and more houses on the Outer Banks look like this--though often built in spearmint green, pink, pineapple, as if the OBX is a slightly more northerly outpost of Miami beach.
Most houses on the OBX when I was a kid looked really differently than this. The grand homes had high sloped dark green roof lines and were covered in dark grey weathered shingles with white trim around windows and doors. Usually they had wrap-around deeply shaded porches and every window was covered by a green shutter--propped open on a green stick when weather was fair. The lesser homes, were lowslung modern concrete block houses with profiles so short that the dunes protected them from the worst winds of incoming storms. All houses built to be cool before air conditioning took off. Houses built to blend into a island of sand and sea oats. Houses built by people who knew, unless the weather was bad, you wouldn't be spending much time in them anyway, and so, built sturdy modest getaways for families to nestle into for a stolen week or two each summer.
A few still exist, but they're a dying breed. . .
Even the dunes want to extract a price from you in Duck. He he he.
