Unusual Homes Around the World

A house built on a rock on the Drina River is seen near the western Serbian town of Bajina Basta, about 160 km (99 miles) from Belgrade, on May 22, 2013. The house was built in 1968 by a group of young men who decided that the rock on the river was an ideal place for a tiny shelter, according to the house’s co-owner, who was among those involved in its construction. [Source: The Atlantic]

A toilet-shaped house, Haewoojae, which means the house for satisfying one’s anxiety, in Suwon, about 46 km (29 miles) south of Seoul, on November 9, 2007. South Korean sanitation activists marked the start of a global toilet association by lifting the lid on the world’s first lavatory-shaped home that offers plenty of water closet space.

An airplane house in the village of Miziara, Lebanon, on May 12, 2015. 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.

A suspected illegal construction is seen covered by green plants atop a 19-story residential building in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, China, on April 11, 2014. The construction, which takes up an area of about 40 square meters, was built 10 years before. Local law enforcement department discovered the construction back in 2012, but have failed to find the owner since then, local media reported.

An interior view of a room inside of the Heliodome, a bioclimatic solar house, in Cosswiller in the Alsacian countryside near Strasbourg, France, on August 4, 2011. The house is designed as a giant three-dimensional sundial, set on a fixed angle in relationship to the sun’s movements to provide shade during the summer months, keeping the inside temperature cool. During Fall, Winter, and Spring, sunlight enters the large windows as the sun’s position is lower in the sky, thus warming the living space.

The Heliodome, a bioclimatic solar house in Cosswiller, eastern France, on August 4, 2011. The house is designed as a giant three-dimensional sundial, set on a fixed angle in relationship to the sun’s movements.

A view of about 70 dome houses, which were built by U.S.-based Domes for the World, for villagers who lost their houses to an earthquake in Sumberharjo village, near Indonesia’s ancient city of Yogyakarta, on May 8, 2007.

Thierry Atta sweeps the courtyard of his house, built in the shape of a crocodile, in Ivory Coast’s capital Abidjan, on September 11, 2008. Atta was an apprentice of the artist Moussa Kalo who designed and built the house but died two months prior.

The Cabin, under construction on the site of Treehotel in the Swedish village of Harads, on July 5, 2010. A lofty new hotel concept is set to open in a remote village in northern Sweden, which aims to elevate the simple treehouse into a world-class destination for design-conscious travelers.

Liu Lingchao, 38, carries his makeshift dwelling as he walks along a road in Shapu township of Liuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, China, on May 21, 2013. Five years before, Liu decided to walk back to his hometown Rongan county, Guangxi, from Shenzhen, where he once worked as a migrant worker. With bamboo, plastic bags, and bed sheets, Liu made himself a 1.5-meter-wide, 2-meter-high, “portable room” weighing about 60 kg (132 lb), to carry with him as he walked an average of 20 km everyday. To support himself, Liu collected garbage during the journey.

Lucero Hernandez, granddaughter of Benito Hernandez and his wife Santa Martha de la Cruz Villarreal, stands in the doorway of her family’s home near San Jose de Las Piedras, in Mexico’s northern state of Coahuila, on January 17, 2013. For over 30 years, the Hernandez family has lived in an odd, sun-dried brick home with a huge 40-meter (131 foot) diameter rock used as a roof. The dwelling is found close to the town of San Jose de Piedras, a remote community located in the arid desert of Coahuila, some 80 km (49 miles) from the border with Texas.

A Japanese television presenter looks at a disaster resistant Japanese soccer-ball-shaped home designed by Kimidori Housing on May 25, 2006, in Gifu, Japan. The 32-sided geodesic sphere, which floats and has the structural strength to resist earthquakes, was priced at less than $15,000.

A woman walks in front of the “China House” in Tianjin on January 5, 2008. The house is decorated with hundreds of millions of ancient porcelain flakes, ancient bowls, dishes, and vases, inlaid everywhere in the architecture.

Dai Haifei, 24, from China’s Hunan province, looks out from his egg-shaped mobile house where he has been living for the last two months, located near his office in Beijing on December 1, 2010. The house cost about 1,000 USD to build, and is made of bamboo strips and a mattress, covered by a layer of heat preservation and water-proof material, with patches of bags stuffed with processed wood peels and grass seeds that could grow grass when spring comes, covering the house like a quilt.

Houses sit on the rooftop of a factory building in Dongguan, Guangdong province, on September 10, 2013. According to local media, the government said the size of the houses was not in line with the original design submitted, thus the construction should be deemed illegal.

Inside the home of Brazilian gardener Estevao Silva da Conceicao, which he calls the Casa de Pedra, or House of Stone, that he built himself in the Paraisopolis slum of Sao Paulo, on October 2, 2012. Silva da Conceicao built his house using every kind of imaginable object in a style very similar to that of Spanish Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi, but without ever having heard of Gaudi.

Bohumil Lhota, a 73-year-old builder, turns the house he built in Velke Hamry, near the town of Jablonec nad Nisou, 100 km (62 miles) northeast of Prague, on August 7, 2012. Lhota conceptualized the idea of the unique house and started to build it in 1981, close to nature to benefit from cooler ground temperatures.

Bohumil Lhota operates a mechanism that allows him to adjust the height of the house which he built in Velke Hamry, Czech Republic, on August 7, 2012. Lhota’s house, which was built in 2002, is able to move up and down and rotate on its sides, which allows him to adjust to his preferred window view.

A Tumbleweed brand Cypress 24 model Tiny House is towed down the highway near Boulder, Colorado, on August 4, 2014. The Tiny House Movement started some years ago, with people around the world building really small living spaces and loving their new simplified lives. These tiny houses can range from 1,000 square feet down to less than 100 square feet.

A man takes a picture of the one of the world’s narrowest buildings, built as an artistic installation wedged between two existing buildings, in Warsaw, Poland, on October 23, 2012. The building is just 92 cm (36 inches) wide at its narrowest point.

Girls play on a trampoline near a home blasted from a rock wall at the Rockland Ranch community outside Moab, Utah, on November 2, 2012. The “Rock,” as it is referred to by the approximately 100 people in 15 Mormon families living there, was founded about 35 years ago on a sandstone formation near Canyonlands National Park. Polygamy was a part of the teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was brought to Utah by faithful Mormons in the late 1840s. The mainstream Mormon church abandoned the practice in 1890, but an estimated 37,000 Mormon fundamentalists continue the practice today and believe multiple marriage brings exaltation in heaven.

The last house of an old neighborhood stands alone in a future Shanghai World Expo 2010 parking lot, under Nanpu Bridge on April 6, 2010, in Shanghai, China. The holdout owner of the house was Shi Yuji. The house was destroyed days later, and the owner moved into a workers’ dormitory.

A full-scale mock-up of the Floating Seahorse home is readied for clients to visit on the waters of The Dubai World on May 9, 2016. The Seahorses are part of an ambitious larger hotel development called The Heart of Europe, seeking to attract interest in The World, the long-stalled Earth-shaped island project off Dubai’s coast.

Original caption from November 11, 1970: A flying saucer-like house, the Futuro II, has been selected as the grand prize for a caption contest being conducted by the Arrow Company for college students across the country. Standing on the edge of International Airport here, Futuro II is 26 feet in diameter, 12 feet high, sleeps 2-4 comfortably and is delivered as a fully self-contained house.

Yekaterina Karinskaya, granddaughter of architect Konstantin Melnikov, walks at home, the private house of her grandfather, also known as Melnikov’s house, in Moscow, on April 3, 2014. The building, made up of two vertical cylinders dotted with hexagonal windows, still looks revolutionary, but the house is caught up in a complex dispute between family members and culture officials that have prevented it from opening to the public.

Le Palais Bulles, or The Bubble Palace, sits atop a hillside in Theoule-sur-Mer in the French Riviera, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. The futuristic mansion, comprised of rounded rooms with rotating floors, was designed by Pierre Cardin and architect Antti Lovag.