9 Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Part of the appeal of being a homeowner is the ability to customize your house the way you like it. For some, that means adding a deck, repainting or expanding the bathroom. For others, it means entering the realm of madness and becoming its eternal ruler. We know all of these houses make you want to scream, "Fake!" but we promise: They're all astoundingly, inexplicably real.
Via CNN
The economy is tough right now, and we all have to cut back. For most folks, that means going out less or securing a lucrative second job in the organ-harvesting market. To others, it means building your entire home in a parking space so tight you might circle the block to look for a better one. Thirty-nine-year-old Fuyuhito Moriya decided to do just that, saving a lot of money and a ton of virginity by purchasing a 30-square-meter parking space on which to build a three-story home for himself ... and his mother.
Via Dornob.com
Well, hello there, tiny sardine people!
To make it work, the Moriyas undertook every space-saving measure imaginable, like using a triangular staircase instead of the normal spiral one (thus saving precious inches), stashing appliances in sliding cabinets and even sharing a bedroom. Though it looks like a bizarre prison crammed into the space between dimensions, the house is functional and livable -- and it only set Moriya back a measly $500,000.
Via Dornob.com
That's right: In Tokyo, a cool half a million dollars gets you a house that looks like an ancient booby trap in mid-crush and a bed that you have to share with your mother.
Via Wikipedia
This house is cutely titled Just Room Enough. At first sight, it looks a picture taken 30 seconds before somebody died in a flood, but the structure is actually built on an island exactly the size of the house. Located between Canada and America on the St. Lawrence River, Just Room Enough was bought by the Sizeland family in the 1950s. They purchased the little parcel of land in the hopes of having somewhere to go to to get away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, and they figured an inaccessible island fortress with literally no earth around it on which strangers could stand would work nicely. Instead, due to the novelty of the house, the island quickly became a tourist magnet.
Via Life
Somewhere in the river, irony is giggling in its tiny rowboat.
Via Google Maps
Via Daily Mail
This real-life Flintstones house stands in Nas Montanhas de Fafe, Portugal. It was built in 1974 and used as a family's rural retreat. Even though the house is next to several immense wind turbines, it still has no running water or electricity. Instead, all of their appliances have been replaced by repurposed animals that spout smarmy one-liners like "it's a living" when in use.
Once the home started appearing on obnoxious "comedy" websites running lists of stupid crap like "weird houses," hundreds of tourists showed up at the remote location, some even trying to break in. Now all windows in the Boulder House have been converted to bulletproof glass, and the front door was replaced with a slab of solid steel. See? You really can have it both crazy ways: You can live like a character from The Lord of the Rings while still preparing for the zombie apocalypse.
Nothing says prehistoric like blast-proof shielding.
Speaking of both those kinds of lunacy ...
Via Dornob.com
The Hobbit House stands in Switzerland, near the famed Vals thermal baths. The building was supposedly built this way -- sunk into the mountain -- so as not to disturb the natural environment ...
Via Dornob.com
... of typical suburbia?
The home is only accessible via a secret entrance in a nearby barn or by, you know, walking up to the big conspicuous hole in the ground and jumping in.
Via Dornob.com
"Watch out for that hole, dude." "What h--" Thump!
Via Design-Milk.com
You might wonder how the Safety House in Warsaw, Poland got its name if you catch it when it's open for business. But check it out after something spooks the inhabitants ...
Via Ifitshipitshere.blogspot.com>
There's nothing anywhere saying it was specifically designed to be zombie-proof, but what else would the owners possibly be trying to keep out? Last time we checked, Jehovah's Witnesses could be deterred by some firm words and impromptu nudity -- a transforming concrete bunker just seems like overkill. The Safety House lacks no essential feature for the paranoid psychotic: The exterior walls open and shut at the touch of a button so that the residents can live somewhat normally during the day, then shutter up for the night (or whenever the trees start whispering). The immovable walls are made of pure concrete, while the sliding portions are made of lighter -- but plenty strong -- steel. And until the zombie apocalypse does arise, the massive security door doubles as a projection screen!
Via Design-Milk.com
The house also features a retractable drawbridge, secret openings and a sliding security gate that seals off the entire property -- not just the home. BAM! While those suckers outside have their entrails feasted upon, the owners are playing bocce and disc golf safe behind the walls of their Paranoia Cube.
Via Design-Milk.com
Via Design-Milk.com
My question is, what happens when the St. Lawrence floods? Does everybody drown?
ReplyAnd mad props for knowing what laudanum is.
#8 Master Roshi?
ReplyI've seen somewhere some guy who makes tiny 2 room houses that are outrageously pricey. I think it's kind of sad that if you are wanting to live in a house with little commodities you have to have tons of money... Less is more I guess.
ReplyI'm not the only one that caught that the family's name was SIZEland, right?
ReplyI want to build that zombie proof house in The Sims 3!
ReplyScrew that, I'd rather build that in real life...
A guy in Austria broke off from the country and tried to form a new nation, Kugelmugel, just because Austria wouldn't let him build the funky, ball-shaped house he wanted.
ReplyI would so live in number six, seven, and four! :)
ReplyNow I want to build my own wacky house...
ReplyI'd live in the Zombie Palace simply for that sweet-ass pool.
ReplyOh Wow! You can share indvidual entries now. Neat!
ReplyWell, it's very easy to guess the people who live in the safe house in Poland: if they are right-wing crazy Catholics they are probably stocking up to survive the thousand-year wintery night of human decadence brought upon by "the gays". And if they're just normal people, they were probably hiding from the President or any other Polish politician.
ReplyWow, Flintstones, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings and zombies! Is there any reality you're willing to face without incorporating it trashy pop culture? Is that by any chance an American thing? It always startles me to see American soldiers in the Middle East lyp-synching to Lady Gaga or whatnot. I wonder if this Cracked article accurately depicts the way soldiers see the things they encounter there...
ReplyI've lived in a much much smaller house.
ReplyAnd I doubt the place in Portugal is called Nas Montanhas de Fafe. This literally translates as "in the Fafe mountains". I doubt that "in" is part of the name of the place.
That little Japanese house seemed surprisingly spacious given it's size.
ReplyYeah. But if you had $500,000 to spend, why would you bother staying there?
ps. I remember reading a story years ago about this billionaire technocrat who built something like the Zombie House, just for emergencies. The mansion was a hi-tech bullet- and blast-proof marvel. When the y2k apocalypse started (lol) the guy was like "screw you mortals", and retreated to his hideout... and then those rotten buggy computer controllers locked him in. But his apocalypse house was so strongly built he couldn't break out. He eventually starved to death. Now that's frickin funny.
Replythere were a lot of people that built insane s**t for y2k. i saw this documentary and this one guy who bought an old underground military facility and fixed it up. the thing was like a f*****g community. many people were supposed to live in it when it was in use.
This is quite impossible to have happened. First of all, the Y2K bug referred to really old unix-based systems which did not feature a 4-digit year representation in their system date. If his house featured doors which opened on timers -which wouldn't be the case- these would use a normal date system. The potential problem with Y2K was known since the mid 80's.
The little egg house actually looks pretty cool... until you need to take a dump. It'd be different if it were in the middle of the woods (cue music to "Born Free"), but I'm pretty sure Chinese cities have the same "no marking the sidewalk" laws as ours do.
ReplyOne person's "cool" is another person's "lame"...
The cast away island is clearly a dangerous place to be. Especially during a storm
ReplyAs cool as it is seeing and reading about these houses, it pisses me off that people would have the gull to actually go out and visit them, let alone try to break into them?! Where do people get off, suddenly thinking that just because they saw it on the internet now they have every right to do what ever the hell they want with it?
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesIf I ever some how become an industrialized billionaire, I'm going to make the sweetest most outrageous house any one has ever seen, and any one who dares to step foot on it will be promptly shot at by a multitude of airsoft pellets. If that doesn't teach them, than I'll just have to step up my game.
Airsoft pellets? What? You won't be able to afford gatling gun turrets on your crazy awesome multibillionaire house? My crazy awesome multibillionaire house is going to be armed to the teeth, and then some.
Your crazy awesome multibillionaire house is going to have teeth? Damn, you're getting creative.
I heard Maynard James Keenan shot some guy with a BB Gun for trespassing on his land.
Try and find some photos of the houses in Christiania, Denmark. It used to be an abandoned military complex, but then the hippies moved in and rebuilt a lot of it. And being stoned (as weed is sold openly even though it's techniqually illegal to do so; what do you expect hippies to be doing?) that led to some pretty psychodelic homes.
ReplyThat hobbit house is awesome.
Reply