Who lives in a house like this?

I love house programmes on TV - French or English - I watch them all whenever I get the chance because looking at other people's houses fascinates me. If you believe all you see in Maison à Vendre and its English equivalents, houses should all be neutral and bland, in order to please the highest number of potential buyers. If you want to build your own house, unless you're featuring on Grand Designs, there are often many limitations on things such as what colour you can paint your exterior walls.

A typical French "lotissement"

In Mauritius, with the notable exceptions of gated residences which have their own rule book, it's pretty much a free-for-all. People invest in plots of land which can stay empty for years until the owner has enough cash to build his house, but when he does, it's usually his 'forever house' and he will design it how the heck he wants. This leads to the most amazing range of colours and styles; in fact the only thing Mauritian houses all have in common is that they are BIG. 

This pink and turquoise house was more useful to me than any road sign when I first arrived!

When they build houses here, they often take up the entire plot of land, sometimes leaving just enough room for a swimming pool.

There's a fenced in pool behind the blue part of the wall

The photo above is of our neighbour's house. He has added a whole new floor, covered terrace, and a pool. Doesn't have much room left for grass or flowers. The builders have also woken me up at early o'clock every day of the week for the past few months. I hope it doesn't take too much longer.

Because we live in a cyclone zone, the majority of the houses here are made of concrete. Every so often though, someone decides to do things a little differently. Take this guy, for example, who is in the process of building a mountain chalet on a land plot at the entrance to Albion.

 There's also this jigsaw-scene-inspired thatched roof. I couldn't see what the rest of the house looked like.

My other favourites from around Albion include:

The turreted house

The house with the independent green tower

The blue house

The giraffe house

The hand painted mosaic house

The future 50 shades of grey house

Of course, amongst all the brightly coloured and crazily shaped houses, you find sad, concrete block houses like this one:

I've been told (though I'm not sure how true it is) that you only start paying housing tax on your new build when it is totally finished, so some people purposely never paint their houses, leaving them 'unfinished' and therefore avoiding paying tax.

To avoid finishing this post on a sad, grey concrete note, here's a picture of the sky from the roof of our house last week.