ashley paine in architectural review:

...the newly striped house also has a place within a longer history of striped architecture. Usually reserved for important civic and sacred buildings, stripes were employed in Roman times, and have appeared throughout Western architecture ever since. They are most commonly associated with the medieval churches of northern and central Italy, including the spectacular cathedrals of [[Siena]] and [[Orvieto]]. It was this Italian tradition that inspired the polychrome banded masonry of Victorian architecture – celebrated by [[John Ruskin]] and so loved by [[William Butterfield]] and his contemporaries – as well as its frequent use in much Postmodern architecture, most notably that of [[James Stirling]] and [[Mario Botta]].

...In the southern Swiss canton of [[Ticino]], a region that shares much of its border and culture with northern Italy, there is a strong peasant tradition of striped houses. Painted in bold bands of colour, these houses are decorated not out of spite, but to put on a public display of care and richness on otherwise simple domestic structures – a poor kind of rustication. By contrast, in [[Genoa]], where stripes cover many of the city’s medieval churches, including the cathedral of [[San Lorenzo]], stripes can also be found on the private homes of the city’s most preeminent families, the Doria being foremost among them. Here, the use of stripes as early as the 13th century for domestic purposes was sanctioned by the city, and it is sometimes said to have marked out these families for their honourable civic deeds.