Always “brick shithouse” or “brick house” in polite company, always a woman.
Didn’t see it at first. And it took a Yahoo! search to locate the Cecil reference. I had remembered it as being somebody else’s commentary. Sorry for stealing (borrowing) your thunder. 
That’s OK. I found it by searching for “built brick house” on the main Straight Dope page, after just searching for combinations of two words in the phrase kept giving me miles of results that didn’t help.