Unusual Life

Via The Phoenix Real Estate Guy comes this picture of a very crooked building. Apparently, it’s a bar located in Sopot, Poland.

Crooked

More crooked

A large three-story Victorian mansion made a voyage aboard a barge from Palmetto, up the Manatee River to Tampa Bay and across towards the Little Manatee River in Ruskin.

The house had been in Palmetto for nearly a century. On Tuesday, it was moved from its original location to make room for condominiums and commercial development. The house is reported to be approximately 7,000 square feet. The barge also held a smaller out-building.

The house, at an estimated 220 tons, was pushed by a single barge until anchoring just off the Bahia Beach area. When the tide increased, the house continued its voyage into the Little Manatee River.

The new owners of the historic Victorian home reportedly plan to use it as a retreat for pastors and missionaries.

One Serious Houseboat Across Tampa Bay

Thanks to Steve Bard for the tip.

via Grow-a-Brain: Refrigerators of all colors and shapes stand 18-feet high, lined up in a 100-foot diameter circle, facing inward toward a cluster of taller fridge towers. It’s as if the outer ring of fridges is worshipping these inner towers, or perhaps protecting them from the outside dangers.

Pratie Place

Like Stonehenge, which is aligned to solar and lunar astronomical events, “Stonefridge” is geographically aligned to its own kind of power source: Los Alamos National Laboratories. Adam Horowitz, a critic of the atomic bomb, purposefully built the monument in a place where visitors can see the labs in the distance. He calls it an “atomic alignment.”

Horowitz needs about 60 mor refrigerators to fullfill his vision. You can email him at primordialsp@earthlink.net

Via Curbed LA, “McMansionization Reaches the Back Yard” features doggie mansions for the pampered pooch. The company, “Doggie Mansions” builds custom dog houses to the owner specifications, to match the existing home or something totally different. One can even have a dog house built large enough for children too, to doube as a playhouse for the smallest members of the family.

Unusual dog houses

Barkitecture

This is slightly frightening.

I love naive folk art, whimsical artist-built environments that spring up organically from the imagination and houses that are hand-built by eccentrics, like mushrooms growing in the deep forest.

But when this style is misappropriated by marketers, it’s just downright creepy.

Via “The Future of Real Estate Marketing” comes “Hobbit Living in Bend“, a new housing development in Oregon called The Shire, featuring Olde World cottages and an “old world village” made up of faux thatched-roof half-timber medieval buildings.

As my friend Howard Freeman notes, “The Shire: Combining the excitement of DISNEY’s feature film The Lord of the Rings, with the shoddy workmanship characterizing today’s disposable, market rate housing industry”. And since it’s a gated community he also wonders if they’ll have a gate-man with a hunch back or a club foot, just for effect.

For a home of a similar vein, but much more authentic, check out Simon Dale’s home he built for his family, a low-impact woodland home in England.

** UPDATE **

As a follow-up to this post, the nephew of the developer of this subdivision, Drew Meyers, who happens to work for Zillow, wrote a post about The Shire that really helped put a face on the development. His story is sweet and makes the place sound good-hearted and endearing, rather than like some bold calculated marketing plan to pander to kitschy nostalgia-lovers. I had written in the past about cynical developers catering to the tastes of the lowest common denominator (Thomas Kinkade – Painter of Blight), and thought this was something like that, but I think I was mistaken. Good luck to these good folks!

From Zillow Blog comes this tip about a home in Blaine, Washington that is a very normal-looking house with an unusual twist: 45 feet under it is a 1,400-square foot underground bunker that was handbuilt between 1976 and 1982 by a man who was legally blind.

Scott Malis’ “One of a Kind House“.

Their Palm Springs weekend house has a midcentury pedigree, but they wanted a vibe all their own. So Lynda Keeler and Bob Merlis matched up vintage and contemporary finds for a colorful look. They unleash their love of all things ring-a-ding-ding in a color-saturated 1960 Donald Wexler-designed house in Palm Springs. Avoiding typical magazine-spread modernism, Keeler and Merlis mix thrift shop vintage, Scandinavian, California craft and IKEA contemporary with abandon.

From a story, with photos, by David Keeps in the L.A. Times
Modern Remixed