• Home is where the heart is, as the saying goes, but it can also be a place for a lot
of insane other things.
How far can you push the limits of house design?
And would the novelty of some of these wear off quickly?
Here’s the fifteen craziest houses ever.
15 – Boeing 727 • If you ever wanted to join the 4-metre-high
club, well, Oregon’s Bruce Campbell has brought a piece of the skies to the ground
by converting a Boeing 727 into a house.
Well, since he loves the plane so much, he’s trying to adapt his living to the space, rather
than make it like a traditional home.
He’s even put in transparent flooring so you can see all of the inner workings.
14 - Piano House, Huainan • Piano House in In Huainan, China is a
big building shaped like an open grand piano and a glass violin that acts as the entrance.
It was the result of a project by students from Hefei University of Technology.
Its purpose is to celebrate the city’s advancement but most visitors are more interested in it
as a romantic hotspot and it’s often booked out for weddings.
13 - The Factory by Ricardo Bofill • Richard Bofill is one of the most talented
architects alive so it’s no real surprise that he’s made himself an incredible home.
He’s the brains behind the W hotel on Barcelona seafront and the Cristian Dior HQ in Paris,
as well as a housing project in Paris that was used as a set in The Hunger Games.
But, for his home, he took an existing concrete factory and started restoring it.
It’s surprisingly green since he’s allowed many plants to grow over and around the structures.
12 – Upside down houses • Upside down houses are a surprisingly
common thing.
It’s not like you find one on every street corner but there are plenty of people around
the world who’ve decided to turn things on their head.
• Polish architects Irek Glowacki and Marek Rozansk built a reversed house in Austria
that even has foundations and parts of the basement that look like they’ve been pulled
right out the ground 11 – N55 walking house
• You know when you’ve had a long day or a big night out and you wish you could
just snap your fingers and be at home?
Well, although we’re a way off teleportation, what about if your house could travel to you?
• A team in Cambridge, UK, built a walking living space, based on the idea of an old
caravan.
However, it only moves at 60 metres and hour so maybe just call a cab.
10 – Hundertwasser Haus • Austrian architect Hundertwasser has created
many iconic building, such as the tiled power station in Vienna.
• But some lucky Viennese can live in one of his buildings, called the Hundertwasserhaus.
In fact, he created it for free just because he didn’t trust the government and thought
they would put up something ugly.
There are 53 apartments inside and it’s a wacky mix of lumpy floors, angled pillars
and a grass roof.
9 – A House for Essex • Grayson Perry is one of the UK’s leading
artists, famous for making weavings and pottery that tell stories of normal people.
• In 2015 he created a home in Essex, called Julie’s House, that was an homage to the
lives of women in the area.
It looks like a gingerbread house designed by Salvador Dali, and if that sounds like
your sort of thing then you can actually rent it out for the weekend.
8 - Robert Bruno’s Steel House • Sculpture Robert Bruno spent half a lifetime
creating an alien looking structure, that juts out of the landscape like a rusted machine.
• He began in 1974 and was still welding by the time he died in 2008.
It’s almost entirely the work of his own hands and he only made it into a home because
he was spending so much time creating the thing.
He just built it because he like creating sculptures.
7 – Nitt Witt Ridge • Art Beal bought this property, called
Nitt Witt Ridge, in 1928 and set about improving it just using a few simple tools and whatever
waste material he could find around.
If you walk around it you can see car parts, washing machine fixtures, beer cans and plenty
of other junk, turned into a unique home.
• It also features a double toilet so the conversation could keep flowing, no matter
what.
6 - Bidzina Ivanishvili • If you visit the Georgian capital, Tbilisi,
you will notice a huge glass building a top one of the hills, looking down on the city.
You can get a closer look from the botanical garden and it appears to be some sort of research
centre, with its many glass sections and steel spheres.
• But it’s actually home to one of the richest men in the world, Bidzina Ivanishvili,
worth around $5 billion.
It’s filled with art and has a tall glass viewing tower.
The steel ball is actually a private café that hangs over one of the pools
5 - Canyon River • At first glance, this just looks like
your normal, incredibly expensive luxury house.
But this oceanfront home on Vancouver Island, Canada, has an amazing, unique feature.
• The house has its own river run through it.
They suck up water from the ocean and send it down an artificial channel.
It’s not just for the wow factor either, it’s actually a very efficient way to regulate
the heat of the building.
• It went on the market for just $13 million so start saving those pennies.
4 – Louis Vuitton logo house • Most of us know that our naighbours are
tacky and tasteless people, but we only get to see that demonstrated when they go crazy
on Christmas decorations.
But anyone across from this family in Mexico has proof every morning.
• The whole house has been painted with the Louis Vuitton monogram.
All they need now are to get one of these cars and use these bin bags.
You’re got to coordinate, right?
3 – Casa de penedo • Casa do Penedo or Stone House, as it’s
known, for obvious reasons, sits on a hillside in northern Portugal.
It was built in 1972 and was perfectly integrated with the four boulders that form the walls,
foundation and ceiling.
• It’s even got a swimming pool.
2 – Villa Akbar • Villa Akbar is sadly not named after everyone’s
favourite Star Wars admiral.
But he surely would order immediate retreat if he ever saw this monument to bad taste.
• Locals call it the ugliest house in Kuwait and it’s hard to argue with them as it is
coated in random roman busts and paintings, as well as a few Mozarts, thrown in for good
measure.
1 – The Heliotrope • This home in Germany demonstrates some
of the high quality engineering that the country is famous for.
It’s so energy efficient that it became the first ever home to generate more power
than it used.
It has a solar panel set up that moves with the sun, a rainwater collection system and
it even processes all human waste into dry, odourless solids.