The 7 Most WTF Houses People Actually Live In
If you ever go house shopping, the first thing you'll notice is how incredibly similar and/or boring houses are these days. Especially if you go driving through a housing development full of new homes -- they're often identical, down to the shade of siding and type of brick. If they weren't numbered, nobody would ever find their way home.
Why can't we live in, say, a big house shaped like a woman's boobs? Or a house that's, like, a big transformer or something? Well, those places do exist, as we've shown you time and again. Sure, they're rare, and you might not want to actually live in them, but it's at least possible that one day you could set up shop in ...
The Transformer House of England
Now this is what we're talkin' about.
Ross Russell of the English village of Thorpeness wasn't sure if he wanted a big glass house full of natural sunlight or a more traditional place where he could more easily walk around nude. Well, as the old adage goes, "People who live in glass houses should build big-ass sliding walls, powered by but a few car batteries."
With the push of a button, Russell's house can shed its skin, but a mighty morphing manor comes at a price. The sheath wasn't cheap, and the double-glazed window panes alone ate up a quarter of the project's $1 million budget. Russell also shells out another grand a year just to keep all the glass clean.
But can you put a price on living in a house with a foreskin?
But there are financial benefits to building a metal condom for your home. Being able to expose the entire house to the sun during the winter (or keep it covered in the summer) knocks a huge chunk off Russell's utility bills. Plus, uncovering the patio during a rainstorm is a quick and easy way to drive away guests who have overstayed their welcome.
The Breast Houses in Mexico
Well, folks, that's definitely an entire building with a gargantuan busty woman languidly emerging from it. Let's see that from another angle, as this is the rare example of underboob architecture.
You can totally see the boob job scar.
How the hell did such a building ever come to pass? Many years ago, in the beachside town of Puerto Nuevo, sculptor Armando Munoz Garcia was looking to express his love of the female form and human sexuality. For Garcia, this meant building half of a giant mermaid smashing out of the ground, with a bathroom at her rear, a living room in her stomach, and a bedroom right behind her massive plaster breasts.
"Stop thinking about the house during sex!"
He later renamed his place "La Sirena," and it now operates as a restaurant. Incidentally, this isn't the first massive nude Garcia has lived in. Prior to "La Sirena," he lived in "La Mona," a five-story naked woman in Tijuana. This project originated as a sculpture in 1991. Upon realizing that he had left a hollow space inside his birthday-suited giantess, Garcia moved in. Mind you, he didn't build "La Mona" in a sculpture garden, but rather smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood. If only the rest of the world's zoning laws were so hilariously lax.
Warsaw's 5-Foot-Wide House
One day, Polish architect Jakub Szczesny was strolling through Warsaw when he noticed a narrow alley between a pre-World War II apartment building and a modern co-op. This particular neighborhood had been designated as a Jewish ghetto under the Nazis, and Szczesny became fascinated with physically linking these two buildings from two different eras.
So how did Szczesny accomplish this deeply symbolic task? Why, by plopping a house inside the alleyway, which, prior to construction in 2012, was wide enough to accommodate a few stray piles of trash and soiled cushions. Here's the before:
But after the hobo skeletons were removed.
And after:
"It's really more of a very deep closet."
The resulting home (which Szczesny dubbed "Keret House," after the project's patron, Israeli writer Etgar Keret), is 5 feet at its widest and 3 feet at its narrowest. The building's space-saving measures include a ladder to reach the bedroom and an entrance that folds up into the floor. (Additionally, you can save valuable morning prep time by showering while you're on the toilet.)
"Look out! The T. rex's head is right behind you!"
Given that Mr. Fantastic is the only person who could live there comfortably 365 days a year, Keret doesn't live there full time. When he's out of town, visiting artists are scheduled to take up residency in this home. Just not the fat ones.
The House Made Out of a Billion Euros
During the mid-2000s housing boom, Irish artist Frank Buckley bought a home on cheap credit for his family. But when the economy tanked, Buckley's marriage fell apart, and -- while all his shit was getting repossessed -- he was forced to move into a shed behind his house.
As Buckley mulled over a pile of shredded, decommissioned euros (which he had used as wedding confetti), he thought about how mere pieces of paper had destroyed his life. This revelation prompted his next project: He would build an entire house out of worthless moolah.
Which didn't stop the Office of Revenue from trying to tax him anyway.
After setting up an artist's residency space and procuring two truckloads' worth of decommissioned banknotes from the mint, Buckley went about building this house brick by brick, each one made of 50,000 euros in shredded bills. Various coins were further attached throughout the building. All told, Buckley's new digs required $1.4 billion in trashed cash, or somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.8 billion.
And he never has to worry about running out of toilet paper.
The Billion Euro House is technically an installation, but Buckley lives in that sucker five days out of the week (he returns to his shed on the weekends). While his money house isn't the homiest home ever, he was happy to report that he didn't even need a blanket. "Whatever you say about the euro, it's a great insulator."
The Australian Spinning Carousel House
This is one you really need to see in motion to appreciate.
One day, Luke and Debbie Everingham were visiting the new home of some friends, and the owners lamented how they wished they could reorient their house a smidge to the north. If they wanted to look in another direction, they had to turn their heads like a couple of chumps. The Everinghams were not chumps, so when it came time for them to build their own house in 2006, this went down:
Yup, they built a house that spins around like a carnival ride (without having to build a guest house for a small army of carnies).
The main floor of the octagonal house holds the bedrooms and bathrooms in the outer circle, with the kitchen toward the middle. Above on the second floor is an observation deck. The house rides on 32 wheels along a 60-meter track, can make a full revolution in half an hour, and runs on an engine "not much bigger than a washing machine motor."
It gets terrible gas mileage, though.
The cost of rotating amounts to a single Australian dollar a week. And while the house's price tag -- approximately $737,000 American -- might be a little too rich for some readers, that's only $40,000 more than the typical house in their neighborhood. And you can bet your sweet ass that none of those suckers turn.
Japan's Foam Domes
While they may not be the most creative folks at naming their company, you have to admire the moxie of the International Dome House Co. for designing homes out of polystyrene, a material that's typically reserved for coffee cups, cheap beer coolers, and heavy-handed lectures about sustainability.
The good folks at IDHC aren't totally off their collective rockers on this, though. The thick walls of their "fairy" houses are fire-resistant and insulate well. To top it off, these ultra-mod igloos are also constructed to weather typhoons, earthquakes, rust, and termites. And from the looks of the promotional photography, this architectural integrity affords owners plenty of peace of mind for sexy parties.
Which are the only types of parties you can have inside a giant tit.
Each of the units is pretty small by itself, with only about 475 square feet of floor space. But you can link these homes together, or recruit your friends to be your neighbors and pretend you're living in a Smurf village. Just check out the city of Kumamoto's Aso Farm Village, which sports 480 of these weird domiciles.
Or possibly Bedrock.
Considering that they'll probably never crumble from age or weather, we're pretty sure the only thing aliens will find on Earth a million years from now are the Great Pyramids and these Styrofoam tit-houses.
The Luxury Caveman House
In 2004, Curt Sleeper purchased Caveland in Festus, Missouri -- a former mining site turned concert venue -- on eBay. Once the structural and property line inspections turned out aces, he and the family went about the enormous task of tossing a house into the Flintstones-like crevice you see below.
"We're gonna need bigger nails."
After four years (and numerous nights of sleeping in tents), the Sleepers' troglodytic dream home was finally complete. Because they left the interior sandstone walls more or less natural, the Sleepers added indoor coverings where crap was occasionally shedding off the walls. So while opening umbrellas indoors might be considered unlucky, they beat the hell out of sandy eggs.
They're only one lava pool from having a supervillain volcano lair.
On the plus side, the Sleepers pay precisely jack and shit for heating and air costs: Geothermal heating and the cool cave walls keep the temperature regulated. The place can get damp pretty fast, though, being a cave and all, so the Sleepers have to run three huge dehumidifiers, which produce about 300 gallons of water a day. Prehistoric man didn't have to put up with such annoying feats of engineering, but then again, the Sleepers don't have to worry about saber-toothed cats traipsing around their backyard.
For more bizarre human creations, check out The 8 Strangest Communities on the Web and The 6 Most WTF Special Edition Comics Ever Released.
