i have often wished to live in a peranakan shophouse, and now i am sure i do want to. i've just been in a gorgeous example of one with yvonne today, and now i keep sketching arrangements of furniture as if i could live there. i wonder if you could possibly build a house in that style, say, if you had a plot of land in palo alto or something. you couldn't have a house like that in boston of course, the snow would get right in. but i expect it's not a very practical sort of house outside of the tropics anyway.