There is surprisingly little information available on the Kettle House in Galveston, Texas.

It is a very interesting-looking structure.  Rumor has it that it was built in the 1950′s, and that it is the top of a silo turned upside down and roofed.  Most of the internet comments out there comment on the fact that it managed to survive Hurricane Ike – a 2009 hurricane classified as a Tropical Depression Nine.  Ike was a horrible hit to Texas, killing 6000 people in just a few hours.  It was the worst hurricane to hit Galveston since 1900.

The address of the Kettle House is 14108 San Luis Pass Road.

Treat, Shade, and Roggs wrote a book called Weird Texas, wherein they say that the house was built by a guy who used to build oil storage tanks.  According to locals, nobody lives in the Kettle House, yet a man comes and does maintenance on the property every so often, only to disappear for long periods of time.

How cool would it be to talk to the guy who holds the keys to the Kettle House?  Why doesn’t a citizen of Galveston approach the guy next time he shows up and ask him some questions?  If any brave soul is willing to do so, they are guaranteed an exclusive interview and some mad props here on You Live Where.  Until then, I guess we’ll just have to speculate as to why someone would build a house that looks like a tea kettle, and if the weirdo internet rumor is true that it actually works like a tea kettle (?!?!) and if it is, in fact, designed to float during a flood.

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Obviously, we love it when an architect has an imagination.  Terry Brown, a pretty famous architect, had a great big imagination – not just for the homes he designed for others, but for the home he made for himself.  It’s called The Mushroom House (though some people call it The Tree House) and it’s located in the Hyde Park area of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Lucky for Brown, Hyde Park is a pretty cool neighborhood, because this house is definitely unique.

Brown got the idea for The Mushroom House after he’d been teaching architecture for some time.  He’s also completed a Fulbright Fellowship with Otto Graf at the Vienna Academy of Fine Art, and he’d designed a pretty funky bookstore for the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center.  He liked to work with wood, glass, tiles, shells, and other “found” materials to make his building look like it belonged in nature.  He started building The Mushroom House in 1992, and over the next 14 or 15 years he added to it with the help of his students.  He made the entire project a learning experience for many of his students.

Brown used The Mushroom House as his secondary residence – he taught in Ohio and also had a private architectural firm.  Most recently, he was teaching at Baylor University in Waco, Texas while simultaneously raising longhorn cattle at the 3 Horses Ranch in Rosebud, Texas.  Sadly, he was killed in a tragic car accident on June 28, 2008 at only 53 years old.  The world will truly miss out on the amazing structures he would have created in the years he should have had left.

The World’s Tallest Log Cabin – The Wooden Skyscraper

photo by the constant skeptic

He is Nikolai Sutyagin.  He is a man who has seen it all.  Well, if not “all”, he’s seen quite a lot.  He was born and raised in a lowly communal flat in Arkhangelsk, Russia.  That’s in the northern part of European Russia, near the White Sea.  He got in some trouble at the tender age of 14 and got sent to a boy’s prison.  When he got out he worked in construction to support his single mom and his sister, and because of his insane work ethic he got referred into an “outside the box” type of working in Russia.  It’s called shabashing, and shabashniks work for the money they merit, instead of the general working system inside a socialist (read:  in this case communist) government.  He was earning way more than guys who were far more educated, and when Gorbachev came in and made Perestroyka happen (the restructuring of the government so that people could own stuff) he used his money to buy a lumber yard and start his very own contracting company.

He got rich.  Really, really rich.  He decided that he needed a house that reflected his status in the Arkhangelsk society (his status was the richest dude in a very poor town) but that he had all this lumber and labor, so why not build his own?  What resulted was the house you see in the image above.  It started out as a mere two-story building (two-story is the limit in those parts) but he didn’t like the look of it and made it taller.  And taller.  And taller.  It’s a tower of a ramshackle log cabin.  It’s a log cabin mansion.

Then he got put in prison for 4 years.  Some accounts say it was a racketeering charge, others say he kept a dude imprisoned in a shack.  Either way, his enemies took the opportunity to put all his vehicles into the river, and to steal all his stuff.  He came out of prison completely broke, but lives in the first two levels of the house with his wife.  In squalor.

The government and the townspeople are not impressed with the structure, and are lobbying to have it demolished.  Sutyagin has gone on record saying the top 12 or 13 stories of his house are “purely decorative”, thus making the building proper a mere two stories tall.  Who will win?  Who do you think should win?  Leave a comment below.

photo by Baron Moe

This palatial summer home was built by Amir al-Mumenin al-Mutawakkil ‘Ala Allah Rab ul-Alamin Imam Yahya bin al-Mansur Bi’llah Muhammad Hamidaddin, Imam and Commander of the Faithful.  Why don’t we call him Imam for short?

Imam was the King of Yemen from 1926 to 1948, when he was assassinated.  We don’t go too far into politics or anything here on YLW, but apparently he was a pretty fair and nice guy, and he had 14 sons, so they were probably pretty sad.

Back to Dar Al-Hajar, though, because is that a beautiful place or what?  Imam had the place constructed as a summer home, and it was constructed on an already-existing prehistoric structure.  This particular valley that Dar Al-Hajar overlooks is a fertile ancient land that is talked about in rock drawings, for Pete’s sake.  Scholars speculate that the old construction on top of the mountain where Dar Al-Hajar was built was older than recorded history.  That’s, needless to say, pretty darn cool.

The structure itself is 7 stories tall, with open courtyards and little pools everywhere.  It has 35 rooms and the stairs look like they were built into the rocks.  They probably were.  The entrance has a 700-year old tree in it.  Even though Imam had the place built in the 1930′s, it looks like a place completely out of time.  A place of beauty and wonder that I’m sure his 14 sons enjoyed – from ducking in and out of the courtyards to exploring the caves beneath (unless the caves were really used for corpses, as rumors say).

Dar Al-Hajar is open to the public now as a sort of museum, though the Yemen travel website says that its “only jewel is the building itself.”

This house sure is a doozy, or at least the fall from it is. The archway at the bottom, while sacrificing some stability, is a nice touch. Do you think that the designer of this house likes roofs? As if this house needed to be more top-heavy. My real question is: Where is the electricity coming from to operate that lift? I imagine that it would be a little windy all the way up there. A great little detail that just proves the amazing things people can do with photoshop these days.

I can’t think of a more precarious setting than what’s going on here. Doesn’t it seem that eventually, due to weathering and whatnot, that the gap would keep widening until the house fell through? At least they don’t need a security system or apparently a door for that matter. I just can’t stop wondering where that ladder is coming from…

From the people that brought you ball in a cup comes house on a stick! If you loved trying to get the ball in the cup, then you’ll love trying to not fall in the water walking up and down to your front door. This was actually inspired by billboards as you can easily see. I just can’t seem to get in my head how that box on a pole is stable in the ocean. Of course,  I wouldn’t mind going to work everyday in a speedboat and you’d definitely have plenty of privacy.  One thing’s for sure, you’re not going for a quick jog any time soon.

Yes, this technically isn’t an Earthship, nor does anyone claim it to be. However, if you recall last week’s post that actually was an Earthship, you might recall how I said that such a house should look like it was slowly creeping over the world be it on land, sea, or in this case, the air.

And yes, this house is no longer technically around, having been in May of 2007. But, what kind of blogger would I be if I let details like that get in the way of just how freaking cool looking this thing is?

According to the folks over at Microscopiq, this wasn’t a house, but rather a fertalizer barn built onto the remnants of an old bunker. The entire structure was held aloft on that one cantilever. And the bulk of the castle appears to be made out of corrugated metal.

The resemblance to the animated “Howl’s Moving Castle” is slightly more than fleeting.

Situated in New Rochelle, New York, this house looks equal parts UFO and Ewok village. The series of pods are connected by walkways, and each pod rests a top a single central stalk. According to various architectural sources, the inspiration for this house comes not from up in the stars, but rather at our feet. Yes, this extraterrestrial looking abode was inspired by the wild flower “Queen Anne’s Lace.”

The resemblance is uncanny...