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:

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.”

Welcome to Elite Waste’s new line of Urban Homes. You are about to witness the newest trend in 21st Century living. Would you like to live in a home and never pay mortgage again? Simplicity and luxury optimized in our High End Dumpster home, The future of urban living has arrived!

The roof on this house must have taken many man hours to cut and install, but it’s quite a beautiful example of a charming shake roof.

If UNUSUAL is what you’re looking for, step right this way…

Our friend, Steve, is a great guy who has a thing about collecting unusual treasures to surround him in his home. The collection is incredible, astonishing, visually overwhelming, and sometimes disarming in nature. We’ve posted several times in the past about Steve’s passion for finding items which are unique, yet compliment other items in his multi-layered mix of visual spectacle. Today’s post is a video filmed by Unusual Life’s Marlow Harris. To say his home is a museum of wondrous treasures is an understatement. Marlow’s new video captures of the true essence of Steve’s incredibly strange home. Enjoy!

Steve invites you to take a tour of his Weird House in Seattle

Here are links to our previous posts featuring Steve and his home with many more photos and videos…

Steve’s Strange House ! – from August 2009

Comics, lawsuits, science fiction and a very unusual home from 4/07

Extreme Home Tour – November 2010

]]> http://unusuallife.com/2011/04/21/steve-bards-weird-house/feed/ 0 http://unusuallife.com/2011/04/15/dick-and-janes-spot/ http://unusuallife.com/2011/04/15/dick-and-janes-spot/#comments Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:40:35 +0000 Marlow Harris http://unusuallife.com/?p=2147 Dick and Jane’s Spot was created by artists Dick Elliot and Jane Orleman in Ellensburg, Washington. Dick Elliott died on November 19, 2008, but the dream lives on in downtown Ellensburg. Jane was kind enough to show us around recently and she continues to live her life creatively and artfully in this beautiful home.

I was also able to make a short video of the exterior of the home the last time I was here. Jane told me that she has made provisions after her passing to leave her amazing home to the Yakima Valley Historical Society.

The art of Richard Elliot

The art of Jane Orleman

This giant King Kong is on the exterior of a home in Ballard, a neighborhood of Seattle. No story, no background available, but someday we’ll stop the car and knock on the door and get the story.

Detail of an unusual round ice bed at the Ice Hotel in Sweden.

http://www.icehotel.com/uk/ICEHOTEL/

Beverly Hills is probably the last place on earth that you’d expect to find a witch’s house, but here it is!

There are so many beautiful mansions in Beverly Hills that it’s hard to keep track of them. But if you turn north from Wilshire Boulevard, up posh Carmelita Avenue, you will discover an extraordinary house unlike anything else you’ll ever find in these parts.

Known formally as “The Spadena House,” but better known simply as “The Witch’s House,” this bizarre, whimsical creation was built in 1921 for a movie studio in Culver City. It was used in several silent films, and then moved to this pleasant residential neighborhood in Beverly Hills in 1926, where it is now a private home.

But the small house might as well have been created by the Brothers Grimm.

It looks for all the world like some haunted fairy tale cottage; you half expect Hansel & Gretel to walk out the front door. The yellow walls of the house slope precariously, giving the impression of imminent collapse. Its dilapidated, pitched roof (covered with odd-shaped brown shingles) is pointed like a witch’s hat. The saggy, wooden window shutters are hung at odd angles. An eccentric picket fence surrounds the property, made of wavy, warped wooden pickets.

Even the landscaping in the front yard is purposefully bizarre, with gnarled, twisted trees, a wooden bridge crossing a moat, a miniature old mill and a sign (hanging from a lantern) which reads: “Witch’s Landing.”

This house has to be seen to be fully appreciated, and is indeed one of the Beverly Hills’ unique sights. (The local children must have a field day on Halloween!)

Recently, the “Witch’s House” had a cameo appearance in the 1995 movie “Clueless,” in a scene where Alicia Silverstone wanders past the house (while pouting about flunking her driving test).

The Witches House is not open to the public, so you’ll have to be satisfied with driving by the home, or perhaps stopping to take a snapshot of its eccentric exterior.

(In July of 1998, the owners sold the home for $1.3 million to Michael Libow, a real estate agent who plans to preserve the historic house. In his remodel of the interiors of the home, he is adding Gaudi-esque elements to create a ‘cottage’ feel to it. Also, there is a new intricate garden wall which accurately reflects the textures of the original building… an addition which looks as if it had always been there.)