1. The Mushroom House – Perinton, New York
A contemporary residence built between 1970 and 1972 with a whimsically odd appearance that resembles mushrooms. The interior rooms in this pod home are decorated in mosaic tiling and the structure’s design patterned after a stem of Queen Anne’s lace.
2. Upside Down House – Trassenheide, Germany
This out of the ordinary house was designed for a special exhibition in Trassenheide Germany and is open to the public for visiting. The creators – Klaudiusz Golos and Sebastion Mikuciuk say they “didn’t build the house for a reason, they just wanted to do something different.” The World Stands on its Head is the official name of the project; even all the room inside were created upside down.
3. Beer Can House – Houston, Texas
In 1968, John Milkovisch started on the exterior of the Beer Can house, making a metal canopy that was adorned with strings of beer can tops, each piece glittering like garlands in the sunlight. Beer bottles were repurposed into walls, casting colored shadows like stained glass. Stacks of bottles were also repurposed into fences, and broken bottles became mosaic material.
4. The Nautilus – Mexico City, Mexico
This unique shell shaped house, designed by architect Javier Senosiain, is very unusual and bold. Following the idea of “Bio-Architecture” – basing buildings on the natural principles of organic forms bringing us back to creating harmony with nature, he was inspired to bring the life aquatic into this design.
5. Cube Houses – Rotterdam, Netherlends
Kubuswoningen are a set of innovative houses designed by architect Piet Blom in 1984. There are 38 small cubes and two so called ‘super-cubes’, all attached to each other. This iconic building has now been transformed into a hostel, where guests can stay in a tilted cube room.
6. The Bubble House – Cannes, France
The “Maison Gaudet” bubble houses in the south of France were designed by Antti Lovag, an anti-conformist architect with no diploma who built this residence in 1975. It stretches over 1200 square meters and each of its 10 suites was decorated by a different artist.
7. The Steel House – Ransom Canyon, Texas
The Steel House, designed by Robert Bruno, was built between 1973 and 1996 out of 110 tons of steel.
8. The Winchester Mystery House – San Jose, California
This Queen Anne Style Victorian mansion is renowned for its size, its architectural curiosities, and its lack of any master building plan. After her husband’s death in 1881, Sarah Winchester began building her mansion. Carpenters were hired and worked on the house day and night until it became a seven story mansion. She did not use an architect and added on to the building in a haphazard fashion, so that the home contains numerous oddities like doors or stairs that go nowhere, windows overlooking other rooms, and stairs with odd-sized risers. After her death, many accounts attributed these oddities to her belief in ghosts.
9. Toilet Shaped House – Suweon, Korea
This toilet-shaped house is named Haewoojae, which means “a place of sanctuary where one can solve one’s worries.” It was designed by the chairman of the organizing committee of the Inaugural General Assembly of the World Toilet Association, who hopes that it will bring attention to the world’s sanitation problems.
10. Auto Residence – Salzburg, Austria
Designed by architect Markus Voglreiter, the house was built using a “3 liter” energy-efficient heating and insulation building system, which drastically reduces energy consumption. The facade, crazy looking as it is, is just for show.
11. Krzywy Domek – Sopot, Poland
This “crooked little house”, an irregularly-shaped building, built in 2004, was designed by Szotyńscy & Zaleski who were inspired by the fairytale illustrations and drawings of Jan Marcin Szancerand Per Dahlberg.
12. 222 House – Pembrokeshire, Wales
This house, located within a national park on the southwestern coast of Wales, is sunk into the ground so the landscape remains nearly uninterrupted by its presence.
13. The Leaf House – Angra dos Reis, Brazil
The roof of this architectural masterpiece looks like a giant flower with six petals, each of which covers a different section of the home. A curved swimming pool works its way through the house before culminating as a small pond stocked with fish and vegetation in the backyard. Architect firm Mareines & Patalano designed the interior of this house to be free of hallways, providing ample space for the beach winds to blow through.
14. Airplane House – Miziara, Lebanon
Miziara prides itself on building residential homes that resemble ancient Greek temples and Egyptian ruins, or this one, built in the shape of an Airbus A380.
15. The Crocodile House – Côte d’Ivoire, Abidjan
Thierry Atta was an apprentice of the artist Moussa Kalo, who designed and built the house. The house looks like a massive smiling crocodile, hollowed out to create the room inside the body of the reptile. It has windows and the bed and is completely livable.
16. The Helidome – Cosswiller, France
This bio-climatic solar house is designed as a giant three-dimensional sundial, set on a fixed angle in relationship to the sun’s movements.
17. Crazy House – Dalat, Vietnam
A strange hotel designed by Dang Viet Nga, an avant-garde artist who got away with more weirdness than she otherwise would because she was the daughter of Ho Chi Mihn’s successor.
18. The Pickle Barrel House – Grand Marais, Michigan
This larger-than-life pickle barrel house is a two-story cabin built of two barrels. The house was designed and built in 1926 for cartoonist William Donahey.
19. Twisted House – Indianapolis, Indiana
This sculpture, made of cedar wood, depicts a tall house bent on its side. The roof of the house digs into the forest floor and five square, glass windows travel upwards on the house and a distorted door juts to the right, open for viewers to interact with.
20. Spherical Treehouses – Qualicum, British Columbia
Built on vision and engineering these handcrafted spheres are suspended like pendants from a web of rope. They occupy a truly unique place in the world while providing a habitat for the un-tamed spirit that exists in us all.
