Friday, September 3rd, 2010

How do you make an ancient structure modern and livable?  Katsuhiro Miyamoto and Associates figured it out with the Hankai House in Akashi City.  The original structure has many old pieces – roof parts and walls that date back to anywhere between 90 and 300 years ago. The original structure was a wooden gate house [...]

The Swedish are so cool.  Seriously.  I think Sweden is an awesome place.  Now they’ve created a hotel that is unlike any other – the rooms are mirrored cubes that sit high up in the trees.  The mirrors make the cubes practically invisible from the outside, so that the natural setting is not disturbed by [...]

If you find yourself driving up the I-94 towards the Illinois-Wisconsin border, you will feel that you have lost your mind and landed straight in the middle of a full-blown mirage around the halfway point.  Looking to the right, you will catch sight of an image directly out of the Nile River Valley and the [...]

We all love a little celebrity gossip – and on this site we especially love an inside look at celebrity homes.  Face it.  They’re rich, so they can afford really nice homes and home furnishings, and it’s fun to see how the other half lives.  Take, for instance, Sheryl Crow’s fabulous New York loft that [...]

No, you didn’t read the title wrong.  330 square feet hasn’t stopped Hong Kong architect Gary Chang from expanding his tiny apartment into a shocking 24-room space.  How is that possible?  Are the individual rooms less than 14 square feet each?  The strange answer is…sort of. Gary decided to make the most of his space [...]

If there weren’t already enough reasons to visit Barcelona, Spain, now you have another one.  Casa Batllo is situated at 43 Passeig de Gracia in the Illa de la Discordia in Barcelona, and it is open for tours to the lucky traveler. The structure itself was built in 1877, but remodeled and finished in 1906 [...]

We don’t usually delve into celebrity news and scoops, but when I saw the specs on Perry Farrell’s Venice, CA home that went up for sale several months ago, I know I just had to write it up here.  The home sold on May 25, so unfortunately you can’t count on me for the latest [...]

In 1979, Michael Kahn and Leda Livant moved to a rural three-acre plot of land in Cornville, Arizona.  Allowed to stay on the property rent-free, Kahn and Livant started building what would become Eliphante immediately, living in an 8′ x 10′ wooden shack that Michael had thrown up to keep them safe during the winter.    [...]

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.”

Drivers in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston TX had a surprise in store with the Inversion Tunnel House, a temporary artwork project which turned two homes scheduled for demolition into a warped work of art with a an apparent vortex through the property! Art League artists, Havel and Ruck, converted the dwellings into an apparent [...]