A mansion with staircases leading nowhere. A house welded from 110 tons of steel over 35 years. Spheres hanging from ropes in a Vancouver Island forest. Every one of these started as a drawing somebody was told was impossible.
We have a soft spot for buildings like these, since our own house plans get changed by more than 95% of the people who build them. Nobody really wants a stock home, it turns out.
1Built 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.
2Built for an exhibition and open to the public. Every room inside is upside down too, furniture included.
3John 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.
4Architect 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.
5Kubuswoningen, 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.
6Antti 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.
7Sculptor 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.
8A 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.
9Built 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.
10Markus 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.
11The 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.
12Sunk 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.
13The 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.
14Miziara 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.
Dave Longaberger founded his company in 1973 making handcrafted maple baskets, and in 1997 completed a seven storey headquarters shaped like one of them.
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.
17A 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.
18Two 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.
19A 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.
20Handcrafted wooden spheres hung from webs of rope between the trees, moving gently with the forest. Each one is engineered as carefully as it is carved, because a sphere suspended from three points has to handle load in every direction at once.
None of them came out of a catalogue. Somebody wanted a shell, or a basket, or a house that never had to be finished, and then found a way to build it.
That is closer to how we work than it might look. Bring us your drawings or start from one of ours and change whatever you want, and the package gets delivered almost anywhere on earth. The weirder the lot, the more interesting the job.
We manufacture components rather than finished rooms, so there is no size or shape limit on what can be prefabricated. Design, estimating and engineering are included in the package rather than billed separately.
