Unusual Life

Via roadfood.com.

For sale: One herd of cows (ceramic, plywood, fabric, paint, etc.). Comes with a supply of warm, gooey cinnamon rolls and a classic cafe.

After 25 years, Jeanne Mae Barwick is retiring from Mae’s Phinney Ridge Cafe in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood. She’s put the place up for sale, and threatens to close it in March or April if an appropriate buyer isn’t found.

Via PhinneyWood.com.

There’s been a cafe at this location since the 1920s. But when Barwick took it over in 1988, she transformed it from a neighborhood destination into a city institution.

Michael Stern at Roadfood.com describes it as “a multi-room cafe decorated everywhere with pictures, statues, blow-up dolls and every sort of nick-nack imaginable, all depicting cows (an ode to the proprietor’s Wisconsin roots).”

On weekend mornings, it can take as long as an hour to get seated. Besides the cinnamon rolls (baked in-house), it offers large portions of your basic American breakfast and lunch fare, plus such specialties as trout and eggs.

It closes at 3 p.m. daily; in offering the business for sale, Barwick notes a new owner could make more money by opening for dinner and offering alcohol.

In an email sent to customers, Barwick says she may hold an “open house and garage sale” at the cafe in March. Depending on what items a new owner may want to keep, the sale could include the cafe’s cow-shaped salt and pepper shakers “and other miscellaneous moo-morabilia.”

Barwick also says she’ll continue to host her popular “Karaoke Bingo” once a month at the Greenwood Senior Center.

Via roadfood.com.

Located amidst “normal” houses in a quiet neighborhood in Tokyo, the home provides many functions for their needs. The space is easy to move about with stairs and ladders that connect the floor plates that range in size from 21 to 81 square feet.

Read more at Design Milk

Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, Dorknob found this great fake grass-covered home located in an Austrian hillside by GRID Architekten.

Here’s another “green” home, almost completely covered in greenery.

You could almost miss this whole home while walking by on the street, buried as it is under dense layers of climbing greenery that wrap up and around on three of four sides (as well as the roof).

Here’s the same house, from the front, showing the walls of windows:

HomeDesignFind features a very modern eco-luxury vacation villa set in the Costa Rica rainforest features a series of energy-conserving thick green roofs for natural cooling and lush velvety greens that contrast with the stark white of the walls.

More “Green Images” from Home Design Galleries:

Saint Valentine’s Day, often simply Valentine’s Day is a holiday observed on February 14 honoring one or more early Christian martyrs named Valentinus.

We are commemorating the day by looking at some unusual homes and interior decor celebrating the holiday.

Life in a Pink House (collection of pink house photos)

In Hong Kong, because of the space, apartments are small and expensive. Gary Chang, an architect, decided to design a 344 sq. ft. apartment to be able to change into 24 different designs, all by just sliding panels and walls. He calls this the “Domestic Transformer.”

This amazing Dune House is located in Atlantic Beach, Florida.

This design by architect William Morgan adopts a Lord of the Rings aesthetic with a very different initial inspiration. The project is actually built into the earth, making two separate townhouse apartments carved into a sand dune. The apartments are entered at street level and a common stair leads to the upper floor’s entryway, bedroom and bath. On the main lower floor, the living, dining and kitchen with mostly built-in furniture open oceanside to a covered terrace at beach level.

The building was constructed in 1975 using swimming pool technology, a gunite-concrete shell anchored to a cast concrete floor. It’s also one of the original green roofs, as it’s topped by a mantle of earth stabilized by native landscaping which helps to maintain a 70-degree temperature inside.

Slide Tour by William Morgan Architects

Designed by J. MAYER H. architects, this “Metropol Parasol” is a central courtyard that becomes the new contemporary urban centre. Its role as a unique urban space within the dense fabric of the medieval inner city of Seville allows for a great variety of activities such as memory, leisure and commerce. A highly developed infrastructure helps to activate the square, making it an attractive destination for tourists and locals alike.

It looks crazy out-of-place in this ancient city of Seville, but I’m in awe of their sense of adventure to build something cool and modern like this instead of a fake antiquity.

Curbed has a great feature today on some unusual chapels, including the the Tiffany Chapel at the Morse Museum in Winter Park, pictured above.

My favorite chapel in Seattle is the Chapel of St. Ignatius on the campus of Seattle University. It’s beautifully designed by Steven Holl, and you can view interior photos here.

The residence is realized as a series of octagons, connected by a central living area, with a sunken conversation pit, fountain and fire ring centered under a large skylight. The present owners have an actual Sputnik spacecraft hanging under the skylight. The center of the roof is raised with a flat roof around the perimeter. The beautiful doors have Italian ashtrays as stained glass. The residence sits on a large heavily treed lot with a thirty foot by thirty foot reflecting pool, as well as a swimming pool.

This is an awesome Powerpoint slideshow of the Thousand Islands area that straddle the U.S-Canada border in the Saint Lawrence River as it emerges from the northeast corner of Lake Ontario.

The number of islands was determined using the criteria that any island must be above water level for 365 days per year, bigger than one square foot (roughly 900 cm²), and support at least one tree or shrub. The area is very popular among vacationers, campers, and boaters, and is often referred to as the ‘fresh water boating capital of the world.’

Be sure to press “Full Screen” to view this, as it’s quite stunning:

Jay Shafer takes you inside his tiny 100 square foot tiny home.

Jay’s Tumbleweed House was so successful, he went on to start a company that specializes in building these sorts of tiny houses or selling you the plans so you can build your own Tumbleweed House.

This beachfront home’s dramatic pool lights up in vivid shades of blue and purple, creating an incredible setting. The pool features an adjustable swim current for when you want to break a sweat, plus a champagne-glass spa when you just want to relax. When it’s time to dry off, this amazing outdoor spot also has multiple balconies and a private rooftop deck for sun bathing. And the price has just been reduced to only $9.9M!

Mountain Googie, originally uploaded by Chimay Bleue.

This unusual building is near Lake Tahoe in Incline City. This was originally an Orbit gas station and has been vacant since around 1998. They’ve been arguing about whether to demolish it or turn it into a Visitors Welcome center for years. Most locals are not fond of the building.

It’s a great example of Googie architecture, modern and eye-catching, awaiting the future in the land of tomorrow.

Museu Dalí de Figueres. Dalí Museum of Figueres. SERIE 01, originally uploaded by ¡arturii!.

A short train ride from Barcelona takes you to Figueres and the fantastical Dali Theatre and Museum. Even lining up to get in, you know you’re in for an intriguing visit.

From Wikipedia : “The Dalí Theatre and Museum (Teatre-Museu Dalí in Catalan language), is a museum of the artist Salvador Dalí in his home town of Figueres, in Catalonia.

The heart of the museum was the building that housed the town’s theatre when Dalí was a child, and where one of the first public exhibitions of young Dalí’s art was shown. The old theater was bombed in the Spanish Civil War and remained in a state of ruin for decades until Dalí and the mayor of Figueres decided to rebuild it as a museum dedicated to the town’s most famous son in 1960. The museum also occupies buildings and courtyards adjacent to the old theater building.”

Dali Museum