Unusual Life

We’ve featured the Walker Rock Garden in Seattle here before on Unusual Life. Here’s a jodavideo taken recently when we revisited there.

Read more about the Walker Rock Garden here.

Walker Rock Garden in West Seattle

The Wilkinson Residence is located in Portland, OR and is designed by architect Robert Harvey Oshatz.

Located on a flag lot, a steep sloping grade provided the opportunity to bring the main level of the house into the tree canopy to evoke the feeling of being in a tree house.

A lover of music, the client wanted a house that not only became part of the natural landscape but also addressed the flow of music.

This house evades the mechanics of the camera; it is difficult to capture the way the interior space flows seamlessly through to the exterior.

One must actually stroll through the house to grasp its complexities and its connection to the exterior. One example is a natural wood ceiling, floating on curved laminated wood beams, passing through a generous glass wall which wraps around the main living room.

Dornob: Design Ideas Daily

Though we’ve previously featured Steve’s Strange House on Unusual Life, I wanted to add this post including some recent videos I’ve captured at the home of Steve Bard so you can see for yourself how things are progressing there. Thank you Steve for the gracious tour of your home. – jodavid
( …and lots more videos right this way…)

…and lots more videos right this way…

Mexican architect Senosiain Arquitectos created “Nautilus” for a young couple with two children who after living in a conventional home wanted to change to one integrated to nature.

The land, with upward topography, is limited to the south, north and east by high buildings. The west adjoining provides a wide view of the mountains. The model work generated numberless changes until achieving the volume needed by the construction: the Nautilus.

The metaphor was to feel like an internal inhabitant of a snail, like a mollusk moving from one chamber to another, like a symbiotic dweller of a huge fossil maternal cloister. This home social life flows inside the Nautilus without any division, a harmonic area in three dimensions where you can notice the continuous dynamic of the fourth dimension when moving in spiral over the stairs with a feeling of floating over the vegetation.

Via Geekologie

This image is unidentified, but is on a great design blog called Home Sweet Home featuring dozens of whimsical and creative interiors. Tip o’ the hat to Dan Dean!

Sent in by Frank Synopsis. Thanks Frank!

The PCI Residence glows, literally — the home’s exterior is made up of 100 percent recyclable polycarbonate walls, which illuminate the home from dawn to dusk, as well as a custom LED lighting system. Chris Pardo, co-founder of Pb Elemental Architecture, says the design plan behind this home “was based on the concept of interacting with and utilizing nature.” Among other green building techniques, the PCI Residence incorporates rooftop solar panels, in-floor radiant heat, a rainwater-harvesting system and low-impact materials such as raw concrete, raw steel, glass, concrete board and bamboo.

Built in 1999 as a snowy mountain retreat, the two foot thick stone castle walls were built by laying up double walls of split ashlar rock to create a permanent formwork for the hidden steel reinforced concrete core and layers of waterproof insulation. Hydronic floor heat hidden in the stone and hardwood floors throughout the castle keep the interior toasty warm in addition to two stone fireplaces. Stone arched handcrafted walnut windows,stained glass, torches, and hand forged light fixtures. Includes 4-car garage, indoor pool, 3 towers, and real stone & carved hardwoods.

Castle is for sale and located in Sandpoint, Idaho. Castle Magic will build you your own castle on your lot!

There’s a guy from New York who builds mega-treehomes for rich people and movie stars, complete with kitchens and baths. Here’s a video from the Today Show. You have to wait through a commercial before you get to the good stuff…..

Treehouse Video

You can build incredible homes with ferro cement. It is extremely strong and durable and the thing I love most is that you can build the whole building, walls, roof, gutters, cabinets, etc. out of the same material.

You build a cement home by first building the frame, which is made of metal. You wire rebar, remesh and lathing tightly together. You can make the design as fanciful as you wish.

Stage two of the process is stucco, covering the frame with concrete. Stucco goes on in layers. The first is called a scratch coat, for which the concrete should be a little drier than the subsequent coats. It’s called a scratch coat, because you have to scratch it up before the mud sets. This gives the second coat something extra to grip to.

The finishing coats are called brown coats. The stucco needs to be almost runny. It goes on a lot faster than the scratch, and can even be applied with a hopper gun.

Want to build your own ferro cement home? Start here at FerroCement.com

Caveland is the home of William Sleeper and Family. They have built this home in a cave found on ebay over the last five years.

Curt and Deborah Sleeper find themselves in a predicament millions of other Americans find themselves in these days: they own a house in which the mortgage payment is about to reset and they can’t afford it. Except the Sleepers’ house isn’t just any old house. It’s a cave, and a pretty cool one at that. Boing Boing ran a post on the cave house last Friday. Apparently, it’s listed for sale on eBay as “Unique Cave Home over 15,000 sf. Beautiful setting — 2.8 acres, commerical or residential.” Starting bid is $300,000.

Read story on Zillow blog by Diane Tuman

CAVELAND

Link to Unusual architecture in Michigan

Writing about Elvis so I don’t have to, Seattle/Bellevue Realtor Debra Sinick writes about the recent tour she took of Elvis’ Honeymoon Hideaway in Palm Springs. It wasn’t an agents or brokers open, but an open house for the public to take an inside peek at the home Elvis and Priscilla used as their Honeymoon Hideaway.

Debra works with Windermere and has her own blog Eastside Real Estate Buzz and also writes for the Seattle PI’s Real Estate Professionals.

Her post provides me with the perfect segue to our premiere Elvis event in Seattle, The Elvis Invitationals!

Please join me on January 24th, 2009 for our 12th Annual Elvis competition to find Seattle’s finest Elvi.

Performing again for your viewing and listening pleasure is Dino Macris, husband of real estate educator and marketing guru, Denise Lones.

I know you want to come! It’s on Saturday, January 24th at Club Motor and advance tickets available through Brown Paper Tickets. Also appearing is professional Elvis Steve Adams and his band Kentucky Rain.

Thank you. Thankyouverymuch!

Magic video of a beautiful mansion in Mallorca.

Palm Tree Mansion