We lived in the second-floor flat of a small two-and-a-half-family house on a tree-lined street of frame wooden houses with redbrick stoops, each stoop topped with a gable roof and fronted by a tiny yard boxed in with a low-cut hedge.
From the outside, Ma Cocotte resembles a solid, if rather chic, workmen's canteen a "Monopoly house, " in Mr. Starck's words with its redbrick ground level beneath a gray zinc first floor.