My heart leaps indecently when I glimpse a rockery in a front garden, a burst of cherry blossom, a mock-Tudor semidetached frontage, or any suggestion of individual fantasy.
One such battle is evident in Cardiff, in a form of facadist high farce, where the rusticated stone frontage of the Victorian Gas Light and Coke Company building lies stranded at the base of a gleaming white apartment tower.
The practice of facadism emerged in the 1980s, when construction technology made it possible to retain a mere sliver of a frontage, and as the rise of the conservation movement increased pressure to preserve the historic streetscape – even if it didn't care much for what happened beyond the surface.
Statues of the John, Paul, George and Ringo posing with guitars loom large on the Victorian frontage, while in the lobby you'll find a funky yellow submarine jukebox.
You get a good sense of its Victorian heyday at the Literary and Philosophical Society, a short walk from the station with its neo-classical frontage.
Last year's triumphant winner of the Carbuncle Cup, awarded for the ugliest building of the year, was another staggeringly misjudged student housing scheme, where a 350-room complex was built behind the teetering frontage of a 19th-century warehouse on -London's Caledonian Road.
The fine frontage of what was once the Cock A Hoop tavern, with varying brick courses rising to ornamental stone scrollwork, now stands like a surreal stage set, propped on pins in front of a completely unrelated building.
But local officials are more preoccupied with revving up the economy of Huimin, whose dreary main street enjoys a burst of colour from the frontage of a 24-hour McDonald's.
Five similar hotels are also planned to replace the tacky, clapped-out frontage that currently passes for the town's sea-front "Golden Mile".These plans represent a quantum leap both for the country's gaming industry and for its seaside resorts.
The cross adorns the frontage of two retired community pillars, DIYing the Saturday away.Ms Harman was featured in a Peckham walkabout photocall wearing a stab vest, to vast local ridiculePeckham may be a byword for urban deprivation, with the afore-mentioned sitcom (never actually shot in Peckham) a constant (and tiresome) media touchstone.
There were only two of them, but they made a whole frontage: huge, compelling, pneumatic.
