Cincinnati’s Mushroom House

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.