As a homeowner, you can customize your house. Some people add a deck, repaint, or expand the bathroom. For others, it means going crazy. We know these houses look fake, but they’re all real.
House Between Two Rocks
This Flintstones house is in Nas Montanhas de Fafe, Portugal. It was built in 1974 and used as a family retreat. The house has no running water or electricity, even though it is next to wind turbines. Their appliances have been replaced by animals saying things like “it’s a living” when used.
The house started appearing on “comedy” websites with lists of strange houses. Hundreds of tourists showed up, some trying to break in. The Boulder House has bulletproof windows and a steel front door. See? You can have it both ways. You can live like a character from The Lord of the Rings while preparing for the zombie apocalypse.
Hobbit House
The Hobbit House is in Switzerland, near the Vals thermal baths. The building was built into the mountain to avoid disturbing the environment.
You can only get to the house through a secret entrance in a nearby barn or by walking up to the hole in the ground and jumping in.
Zombie-Proof House
The Safety House in Warsaw, Poland, is called that for a reason. But check it out after something spooks the people inside.
It wasn’t designed to be zombie-proof, but what else could the owners be trying to keep out? Words and nudity can deter Jehovah’s Witnesses. A transforming concrete bunker is overkill. The Safety House has everything a paranoid person could want. The exterior walls open and shut at the touch of a button so the residents can live generally during the day and then close them up at night. The walls are concrete, and the sliding parts are steel. The big security door can also be used as a projection screen!
The house also has a retractable drawbridge, secret openings, and a sliding security gate that seals off the entire property. BAM! While the zombies feast on the outside, the owners play bocce and disc golf inside their Paranoia Cube.
Bubble House
This Tatooine home was designed in the 1970s by Antti Lovag. An eccentric wealthy industrialist asked him to create the house near Tourrettes-sur-Loup in France, but when the deal fell through, fashion designer Pierre Cardin took on the house in 1989. That’s right. Two people loved living in a bubble and could afford it.
All the rooms are round, with no straight edges. Cardin says the circle is his symbol, and the sphere represents the world’s creation and the womb. “I’ve always used holes, cones, and breasts in my designs.” The architect who built the house says straight lines are “against nature.” He thinks humans have confined themselves to cubes with dead ends and angles that impede our movement and break our harmony.
Sidewalk Egg House
Dai Haifei is a Chinese architect. He works for a company whose slogan is “Our Buildings Are Eggs Laid by City.” Dai now lives in an egg-shaped house small enough to fit on the sidewalk.He built this pod on a bamboo frame with bags of sprouting grass on the outside. It cost $964. The pod is small but has a bed, water tank, and night table, and it makes you feel cramped. Dai says he works until midnight and only uses his home for sleep, which allows him to save money for a better life.