Here are some photos of homes that being to touch the hope that one day our house can be unfettered and moving won’t require packing any boxes or heavy lifting; you simple move the whole house. How will that affect the neighborhood marketing value, I wonder?

Do you have photos or pictures of houses floating above the ground to share? Even cool looking house boats would be welcome. Make a comment below and give us a link to the photo.

Related articles

• Creative Energy’s Top 5 Fun Home Improvements (creativeenergyexteriors.com)
• The History of the Science Museum of Virginia (richmondlife.net)
• The Unusual Physics of Floating Pyramids (news.sciencemag.org)

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.

Related articles

• Fine Dining at Little Venice (eatinginrichmond.com)
• Top 10 Amazing Bioluminescent Organisms (toptenz.net)
• Best Sticky BBQs (drivinganddining.com)
• Turn Over A New Leaf Fish (homemadehealthyrecipes.com)

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. And it is in fact so tall now that it’s a danger to even walk around on the highest levels, and the idea of building a fence or railing on the higher levels has been floated. But what would the fence look like? Well, unique-looking fences are all around us, whether they be London, England fences or Richmond Va fences, you can find unbelievable, pristine fences in every city of note. So, it shouldn’t be too hard for Mr. Sutyagin to find inspiration.

The owner of this cabin eventually 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.

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…

The short version of the creation of The House on the Rock is that Alex Jordan was majorly offended by something Frank Lloyd Wright said to him, so he set up to build something.  He saw a big rock and said he was going to put a Japanese house up on it and “advertise it.”  Wright actually reported Jordan to Iowa County (that’s in Wisconsin) officials, and bought land nearby.

Jordan began building in 1945 and finished the main structure in 1959.  The rock it is built upon is Deer Shelter Rock, a 60 ft tall rock.  The earlier structures were the house proper, a Gate House, and a Mill House.  Jordan sold the house in 1988 and the guy who bought it just kept on building.

By the time Jordan sold the property, it contained the Carousel Building, which contains the World’s Largest Carousel.  Also, the Infinity Room already existed.  The collections of oddities and delights have grown over the years.  You totally need to see pictures of all this stuff, don’t you?  Here you go.

The House on the Rock Entrance

walk-in fireplace

Infinity Room

automated instruments

Related articles

• House Painting In Australia Rocks (frommyexperience.com)
• Top 10 Unique and Strange Towns in Hawaii (makethelist.net)
• Home Improvement Trends in 2011 (infographicsshowcase.com)
• The Virginia State Capitol Building – the Most Visible Richmond Landmark (richmondvapresents.com)
• A House on the Rock (cornerstonediscipleship.wordpress.com)

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.

Related articles

• Top 10 Apartments in Dallas – Fort Worth for Golfers (makethelist.net)
• 5 Ways to Protect Your Home While You Travel (makethelist.net)
• Home Improvement Trends in 2011 (infographicsshowcase.com)

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 fertilizer 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.

Related articles

• Best Sand Castle Sites (verybestsites.com)
• Elephants and Giraffes Children’s Boutique (richmondvapresents.com)
• Corn Eating Personality Test (infographicsshowcase.com)
• Earthquake Resistant Tire Earthships for Haiti Disaster Relief (inhabitat.com)

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...

Related articles

• Best Online Exercise Video Sites (verybestsites.com)
• The 10 Greatest Alien Invasion Movies [VIDEOS] (coedmagazine.com)
• Holidays Stylish Novel York (frommyexperience.com)

The house is located one acre of wooded land in Highland Park, IL, and is over 5000 square feet.  It has four bedrooms, 4 baths, and a heated and cooled garage.

Remember the car?  With the crashing out the….HA!  So, don’t do that.

This is the kitchen.  None of the listings say what kind of appliances it has, etc.  That could be because the house was built in 1953.  Who knows?  The kitchen might not have been updated.  That’s not always a bad thing.  You don’t have to undo a bunch of renovations that aren’t your taste.  But, for the purposes of this article, who cares?  I’m not trying to sell this house, I’m just trying to tell you about it and show you pictures.  So, here are some more pictures.

The bathroom.

The dining room.

The entrance.

Another exterior shot.

The office.  Nice view, eh?

A view of the pylons that hold the house suspended over the forest.

The spacious open floor plan.

More of the spacious open floor plan.

The house was designed by an architect named A. James Speyer.  Speyer graduated from Carnegie Tech in 1934, and he thought most of the architecture in the US was boring, so he went and spent 3 years in Europe.  He came back to the US and did a little more schooling before he started designing buildings in America.  He designed this post’s feature home for Ben Rose.  I don’t know anything about him, but his family lived in the home until very recently.

The garage addition was designed by Speyer’s student David Haid, who reportedly wasn’t a super nice guy.  But whatever.  It’s a pretty cool garage.

The house costs about $1.7 million dollars.  That’s a pretty good bargain for that size house in that part of Illinois, all things considered.  Actually, that’s a lie.  But it still isn’t as expensive as it was when they first listed it at $2.1 million dollars.