20 of the world's weirdest houses

The Mushroom House

Built between 1970 and 1972, and it does look like a cluster of mushrooms. The pods sit on stems patterned after Queen Anne's lace, which is a stranger design reference than it sounds until you see the thing.

Inside, the rooms carry intricate mosaic tiling. It is the rare novelty house that is as considered indoors as out.

Architect James H. Johnson designed it as five pods raised on concrete stems, four of them living space and one an entryway. The pods are cast concrete on steel, cantilevered outward so the footprint touching the ground is a fraction of the floor area above it, which is how the house sits so lightly in the trees.

It has changed hands several times and has been listed publicly more than once, which is unusual for a building this singular. Most novelty houses become museums or fall down. This one keeps finding people willing to live in it, which is probably the strongest thing that can be said about any experimental design.

Upside Down House

Built for an exhibition and open to the public. Every room inside is upside down too, furniture included.

The construction problem is more interesting than the joke. Everything visible is inverted, which means furniture had to be fixed structurally to what is now the ceiling, and the roof had to be built to take loads a roof never normally sees. Visitors report the disorientation is genuine rather than theatrical: the eye keeps trying to correct what it is seeing and cannot.

It sits on the island of Usedom on the Baltic coast, a summer tourist area, and has spawned imitations across Europe since. The original remains the one people travel for.

Beer Can House

John Milkovisch started in 1968 and never really stopped. The walls are built from beer bottles, which insulate and throw coloured shadows like stained glass. An awning of beer can lids catches the light like tinsel.

Fences from repurposed bottles, mosaics from the broken ones. Nothing was thrown away, which makes it one of the more genuinely sustainable buildings on this list.

Milkovisch was an upholsterer by trade and did the work over roughly eighteen years, in his own time, without a plan. The estimate usually given is around fifty thousand cans, though nobody counted. He reportedly said he simply got tired of mowing the lawn, which is how the concrete and marble inlay in the garden began.

It is now owned and preserved by the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art and open to the public. That matters, because folk art architecture usually disappears when its maker does. The insulation claim is real too: neighbours noted the house was noticeably cooler, which the aluminium and glass would explain.

The Nautilus

Architect Javier Senosiain works in what he calls bio-architecture: buildings shaped by organic form rather than by the straight line. This one is a shell, inside and out.

Flowing curves throughout, stained glass along the spiral, and almost no right angles anywhere in it.

Senosiain built it in ferrocement, a thin steel mesh sprayed with concrete, which is what allows the continuous curve with no visible structure. There are no straight walls and almost no flat floors. A spiral of stained glass runs along one flank, so the interior light shifts colour through the day as the sun moves around the shell.

It was built for a family with two young children, which is the detail people find hardest to believe. It is not a folly or a showpiece; somebody lives in it, does homework in it and keeps a fridge somewhere inside it.

Cube Houses

Kubuswoningen, designed by Piet Blom in 1984. Thirty-eight small cubes tilted at 45 degrees, plus two larger super-cubes holding the entrance and a common area.

Blom described the scheme as a forest, each cube a treetop on a hexagonal trunk, with the whole cluster forming a village raised above a road. It is one of the few architectural metaphors that survives contact with the actual building.

The tilt has a real cost. Each cube is roughly a hundred square metres, but the sloping walls mean a significant share of that is unusable, and every piece of furniture has to be considered against the angle. Residents describe it as workable rather than comfortable, which is a fair trade for living inside a landmark.

The Bubble House

Antti Lovag built this in 1975. He had no formal architecture diploma and no interest in the right angle, which he regarded as a human imposition rather than a natural form.

Twelve hundred square metres, ten suites, each decorated by a different artist. Glass and concrete curve into each other with no obvious break between inside and out.

Houses like this raise the obvious question of what a build actually costs. For something more conventional, we keep a guide to what it costs to build a custom home.

Lovag rejected the right angle on principle, arguing that human beings do not naturally move in straight lines and that rectangular rooms are an industrial convenience rather than a human one. Every space here is a sphere or part of one, joined by curved corridors.

Pierre Cardin bought the property and it became known as the Palais Bulles. It has hosted fashion shows and film festival parties for decades and was put on the market at a widely reported figure that made international news. It is now as much a venue as a residence, which is what tends to happen to a house this famous.

The Steel House

Sculptor Robert Bruno began in 1973 and was still working on it when he died in 2008. Thirty-five years, and he shaped and welded all 110 tons of steel himself.

Bruno had no engineering training and worked without drawings, cutting sections apart and rewelding them when the shape was not right. Reports suggest he rebuilt parts of it several times over. The house stands on four legs, giving it the look of something that has walked into the canyon and sat down.

The interior is around two thousand square feet across three levels, with curved stained glass and steel surfaces throughout. He moved in before it was complete and it was still unfinished at his death, which is either a failure or the entire point depending on how you look at it.

The Winchester Mystery House

A Queen Anne Victorian that grew to seven storeys with no architect and no construction plan at all. After her husband died in 1881, Sarah Winchester employed carpenters who worked around the clock, and she added to it at random.

Doors that open onto a drop. Stairs that end at a ceiling. Windows looking into other rooms. Risers built at irregular heights. The ghost stories came later; the architecture came first.

The numbers are the strange part. Roughly a hundred and sixty rooms, forty bedrooms, two thousand doors, ten thousand windows and forty seven fireplaces, built continuously for around thirty eight years. It reached seven storeys before the 1906 earthquake brought the upper floors down.

Sarah Winchester had inherited a substantial fortune and considerable ongoing income from the rifle company, and she spent an enormous sum on the work. Without an architect, later additions were built against earlier ones, which is the actual explanation for the doors opening onto drops and the stairs ending at ceilings. The ghost stories arrived after her death and have outlived the architecture as an explanation.

Haewoojae, the Toilet House

Built by Sim Jae-duck, who chaired the inaugural assembly of the World Toilet Association. The shape is a joke with a serious purpose behind it: drawing attention to the global sanitation crisis.

It is roughly four and a half thousand square feet of concrete and glass, and it reportedly cost well over a million dollars to build. Sim Jae-duck was born in his grandmother's outhouse, which is the detail that makes the whole thing land differently: it is a joke he had earned.

He died two years after it was completed and the house passed to the city of Suwon, which runs it as a museum of sanitation. Roughly half the world lacked safe sanitation when he built it. It remains the only building on this list constructed to make a public health argument.

Auto Residence

Markus Voglreiter wrapped a car around an ordinary house. Underneath the bodywork it is a serious piece of energy design, using a three litre heating and insulation system.

The starting point was an ordinary 1970s bungalow. Voglreiter wrapped a Volkswagen Beetle silhouette around the existing structure during a deep energy retrofit, so the strangest looking house here is also, underneath, a fairly standard renovation done unusually well.

The three litre reference is to energy use rather than engine capacity, a German shorthand for a building consuming the equivalent of three litres of heating oil per square metre per year. That is a serious standard, and reaching it while attaching a car to the front of the house is the genuinely impressive part.

Krzywy Domek

The crooked little house, built in 2004 by Szotynscy and Zaleski. The design came from the fairytale illustrations of Jan Marcin Szancer and Per Dahlberg, and it looks exactly like a drawing that got up and stood there.

One correction worth making: it is not a house. It is roughly four thousand square metres of shopping centre and offices on the Monte Cassino promenade, and almost every list including this one has called it a home at some point.

The distortion is structural rather than applied. The walls, window openings and roofline all curve, so the building looks different from every approach and photographs badly from all of them. It has become the most photographed building in Sopot regardless.

222 House

Sunk partly into the ground inside a national park on the Welsh coast, so the landscape runs over and around it almost uninterrupted.

Of everything on this list, it is the one least interested in being noticed, which is its own kind of strange.

The architects were Future Systems, and the house is properly called Malator. It was completed in the mid nineteen nineties, cut into a coastal slope and covered with the turf that was removed to build it, so from behind it reads as a hill with a single round window in it.

The local nickname is the Teletubby house, which the owners have reportedly borne with patience. The single large window facing the sea does the work of an entire elevation, and the earth covering means the building holds a remarkably stable internal temperature without much help.

The Leaf House

The roof is a six petalled flower, each petal covering a different part of the house. A swimming pool winds through the building and ends as a small fish pond in the rear garden.

Mareines and Patalano designed it for a hot humid coastal climate, and almost every decision follows from that. The six petals of the roof overhang deeply enough to shade the walls through the day, and the absence of corridors means air moves through the whole plan rather than stopping at doorways.

The pool threading through the building is not decoration either. Moving water cools the air passing over it, so the house is partly air conditioned by its own landscaping. It is a good demonstration that the strangest looking solution is sometimes the most practical one available.

Airplane House

Miziara is a town where residential architecture takes its cues from Greek temples, Egyptian ruins and, in this case, the Airbus A380. Wings, engines and windows all recreated at building scale.

Walking its streets means passing several centuries and one aircraft in the space of a few blocks.

Miziara sits in the mountains north of Beirut and much of its wealth came home with emigrants who made money abroad and built on their return. The result is a town where a Greek temple can stand next to a pharaonic gateway next to an aircraft, all of them somebody's actual house.

The aircraft house recreates the double deck profile, wings and engine nacelles at building scale. Whether it works as architecture is a matter of taste. As a statement about who built it and where they had been, it is completely unambiguous.

The Longaberger Basket Building

Dave Longaberger founded his company in 1973 making handcrafted maple baskets, and in 1997 completed a seven storey headquarters shaped like one of them.

The scale is what does not come through in photographs. It is roughly a hundred and eighty thousand square feet across seven floors, and the two handles above the roof reportedly weigh close to a hundred and fifty tons between them, heated to stop ice forming and falling.

Longaberger reportedly overruled architects who wanted something more abstract, insisting on an exact scale replica of the company's medium market basket. The company later declined and the building sold for a small fraction of what it cost, standing empty for years before redevelopment. It is the clearest illustration on this list of what happens when a building is a logo.

The Dancing House

Completed in 1996 by Vlado Milunic and Frank Gehry, on the site of a building destroyed in the Second World War. A glass tower leans toward a rigid stone one, and the pair are known locally as Ginger and Fred after Rogers and Astaire.

The curves and irregular windows caused real argument in a city of centuries-old architecture. It now holds offices, a hotel, a gallery and a rooftop restaurant over the Vltava.

Milunic developed the concept with Vaclav Havel, who lived next door, and Gehry was brought in as the international collaborator. Gehry originally proposed the Ginger and Fred name and later distanced himself from it, feeling an American pop reference sat awkwardly in Prague.

The engineering is more difficult than the sculpture suggests. The glass tower narrows toward its base and leans against the stone one, so the structure is carrying an eccentric load that a conventional frame would not. Ninety nine concrete panels were used, each a different shape.

Crazy House

A hotel by Dang Viet Nga, built in organic shapes that look grown rather than constructed. Twisted staircases, irregular windows, furniture that appears to be resisting gravity.

Properly the Hang Nga guesthouse, and it has been under continuous construction since 1990. Dang Viet Nga trained as an architect in Moscow over several years before returning to Vietnam, so the surrealism is deliberate rather than naive.

Rooms are themed around animals, each with a concrete beast somewhere in it, and guests can stay overnight. Concrete is sprayed over steel armature and hand shaped, the same technique as the Nautilus, which is why both buildings look grown rather than built. It keeps expanding, so no two visits are quite the same.

The Pickle Barrel House

Two enormous pickle barrels turned into a two storey cabin in 1926 for the cartoonist William Donahey, whose characters lived in one.

Windows and doors cut into the staves, and inside a living area, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom across two floors. Considerably more house than the outside suggests.

Donahey drew the Teenie Weenies, a hugely popular newspaper strip about tiny people who lived in discarded human objects, a pickle barrel among them. The Chicago pickle company that sponsored the strip had the house built as a promotional gift, which makes it advertising that outlived the product.

The barrels are cedar, the larger one about sixteen feet across. It was moved several times before being restored and settled in Grand Marais as a museum. Of all the buildings here it has the clearest lineage: a cartoon became a building because a company wanted the association.

Twisted House

A cedar sculpture rather than a dwelling, and the only entry here nobody has lived in. The house appears to be bending onto its side, roof driving into the forest floor as though it had grown there.

Five square glass windows climb the wall and a distorted door juts out to the right, left open.

It is a sculpture rather than a dwelling and belongs to a tradition of artists using the house silhouette as a subject. The form is instantly legible as a home while being entirely unusable as one, which is what gives it its unease.

Cedar was chosen for weather resistance, since the piece lives outdoors permanently and is meant to grey and soften rather than be maintained. The open door is the detail people remember. It invites you in and there is nothing to come into.