Xiaohua: Hello and welcome to Roundtable’s Word of the Week. Now, this week we are talking about villa or in Chinese the word is “别墅”. But, Mark, when Chinese people talk about “别墅”, they actually are just talking about any kind of detached housing, but is it different from a villa?
Mark: Well, from my own perspective, we think of villa as being something that is almost exclusively Spanish or Italian. We think of it as a rather elegant, usually white colored, plastered house, perhaps near the sea with a beautiful view of hills and mountains. So it does have connotations of luxury to British people. For us this is a very European, continental word.
Xiaohua: I see. 所以在英国人的眼中，villa这个词是和那种西班牙式的豪华别墅联系在一起的。Let’s take this opportunity to talk about different kinds of houses. One that comes to my mind is the Tudor-style houses.
Mark: Is this a house with the door at the front, and a door at the back? TWO DOOR?
Xiaohua: Oh, no!T-u-d-o-r... It’s how we pronounce it. I mean you may find in American English, they say ['tju:dər], but TWO DOOR is too far away from the pronunciation...not confuse it with a house with two doors. Tudor dates from the time from the Henry VIII, and so forth people have been watching Wolf Hall and Tudors, and all those things. And this is the style. There are very few Tudor buildings left, one of them is to the southwest of London and it’s called hunting Court, and it’s King Henry VIII’s home. But when people build a house now, in that kind of style, it’s called mock Tudor - mock is another word that means fake. But it doesn’t have a negative connotation in architectural terms.
Xiaohua: Of course. Tudor style就是仿都铎王朝式的别墅。Now for my understanding, a lot of them use dark red bricks, right? It gives us outlook of Solomon feel, also there are like steeply pitched roofs.

Mark: Yes, that’s right. And it’s interesting because when it comes to people’s own homes, and again I’m talking about in the UK, they think that red brick is rather high-end and quite attractive. And yet conversely, if you are talking about universities, if you say somebody went to a red brick university, that’s actually an insult. That means they didn’t go to one of the really old universities like Cambridge or Oxford or Durham. These places have got hundreds of years old and were built of stones. But a red brick university education is considered to be slightly inferior university education.
Xiaohua: Interesting. 所以红砖虽然感觉上是很高贵典雅，很古老的感觉，但是如果有人说你上了一所红砖大学，那就是说你上的并不是一所一流的学府。OK, let’s talk about the Victorian houses. I think you know more than me in this, Mark.
Mark: Yeah, Victorian, this refers to the reign of Queen Victoria. It refers to that period of history mainly 19th Century from about 1860 to 1900. Many many British people live in Victorian housing, which is well over 100 years old. That just proves how well they built it. You tend to find they have high ceilings, also very spacious rooms, and it might have some wooden beams in the ceiling as well, which are all seen as very desirable features these days.
Xiaohua: 那维多利亚式的建筑就是在英国维多利亚时期，也就是大概是1837年到1900年初这样的建筑风格。通常是非常宽敞，并且还有凸于墙体之外的窗户。
Mark: I mean the other one that’s kind of linked on to Victorian houses is Colonial-style homes. If we look it in terms of the actual word, it means something you would find in some sort of colony. This is a word that is used to describe, for example, the French colonial style you’ll find in some spots in Vietnam. You’ll find British colonial style in some parts of world as well - it’s where the Empires went. Now the thing is what is the Colonial style? Well, here I have to quote an English judge who, when he was presiding over a pornography trial , he said “if you ask me to define pornography, I couldn’t do it, but I know it when I see it”. I think it is the same as colonial architecture style. Personally, I know it when I see it, but it is a bit hard to explain what it is.
Xiaohua: That’s right. Colonial-Style home，殖民地式的建筑，应该指的是英国和其他的西方老牌列强在其殖民地所建造的房屋样式。
Mark: If you go to South and Central America, you’ll see Spanish colonial style as well. The other one, interesting one, you will spot if you go to France is called the Pigeonaire style. If you look at some larger French houses, you see things like witches’ hats. Think of Harry Potter - the Dumbledore hat in Harry Potter. They have these things on the ends of some of their buildings in France, very, very tall, very pointy narrow black conical decorative cones. These are called pigeonaires. This comes from the word “pigeon”, which is a type of bird. It’s because they look like the homes where pigeons might live.
Xiaohua: I see. Pigeonaire指的是这种又高又尖的锥形屋顶，经常在法国见到。