I stumbled across this row of weird looking houses yesterday:
From their design, I would guess these were built in the 1970s and it may be that their design is partly because of the prevailing design trends of that particular time in history, but I think what was going on here was gaming of planning rules.
Most of the other houses in this area are bungalows - which in the UK is a word to describe a single-storey house with a traditional gable or hipped roof; the roof edge comes down to ceiling level of the accommodation - ‘Chalet Bungalows’ are a variant of this where the loft space of the roof contains one or more rooms (usually with a smaller floorplan than the ground floor) - a chalet bungalow might be the result of a loft conversion, or might be built that way, but in either case, if the roof comes down to the height of the top of the ground floor ceiling, it’s a ‘bungalow’, normally.
I speculate that in the case of the houses in the map link above, there was a planning restriction of some kind, to build bungalows, and this was perhaps defined in some technical way by the description of the roof profile, and the architects here found a way to game that definition and build what is essentially a house with two complete stories of equal floorplan, but where the upper floor is, in some arguable sense ‘contained within the roof’.
Do you have any examples of weird-ass houses, and speculations on their reason for existing?
I lived in one, so I’ll speak anecdotally here. It was my parents’ ‘weekend house’ in the mountains, which they had a Japanese (or Japanese-inspired) architect design. It was a series of flat-roofed mostly-glass boxes on telephone-pole stilts, connected by walkways. Privacy was ensured by it being surrounded by trees on all sides (which also meant that the sun rarely shone on it, despite it being on top of a hill). It did look rather Japanese although entirely different construction techniques were used.
. My husband and I lived there for seven years, while we both finished delayed college degrees and built our own house nearby; one of the boxes was reserved for my parents’ use but they didn’t spend much time there as it turned out.
They loved modernism, and it was essentially like inhabiting a modernist art installation. The facts that there were no windows in the kitchen despite the rest of that box being glass, that the roofs leaked, that you had to heave open a heavy sliding glass door, go outside, take a rather long walk, and heave another such door open and closed, just to get to a bathroom, that the glass boxes were impossible to keep warm even in that very mild climate (and I’ve not gotten to the rest of the list), were all very minor to them, as they never did live there on a permanent basis.
Eventually it was nearly completely destroyed in the earthquake of '89. The boxes folded like a house of cards, or bounced off their poles and flew into the forest. It was a total loss, entirely because of the stupid construction. Strangely enough, conventional houses are built the way the are for real reasons.
Residents of the San Francisco area will surely point out the Flintstone House, in nearby Hillsborough.
The heavily themed Flintstone and dinosaur motif, inside and out, is apparently a fetish of the current owner, and not of previous owners. The house used to be painted white.
A little further down the coast, in Cambria, San Luis Obispo County, we have Nitt Witt Ridge:
There have been tens of billions of people alive in the last century and they’ve built a billion dwellings. Think of the the far end of a bell curve. Now think of the far end of a bell curve with a billion examples. The mind boggles.
Zoning, mortgages, and community pressure certainly affect the far ends, so I doubt that the distribution is a bell curve. What would be the opposite of a really weird house - an excessively normal one? So the world probably conforms to a logarithmic curve with “normal” near the y-axis.
But the point stands. It may be more interesting to ask why we see so few of the points far out on the x-axis rather than ask why they exist.
I don’t have any pictures to post, but I stumbled across one today. I couldn’t swear that it’s going to be a house, because it’s still under construction. However, it is in a residential neighborhood.
It appears, as best as I could tell, to be a 3-story tall A-frame building.
I feel like these are two sides of the same coin. ‘Why did someone build this weird looking house?’ potentially reveals the uncommon reasons why people build weird houses.
There is a house in my area that had an “upside down” roof in my childhood (with a “v” shape rather than an “a” one). It must have been problematic, because years later they (or new home owners?) built a “normal” shaped roof on top of that, leaving a sort of rhombus shape on top of the house.
Just spitballing, but I would guess it is divided between 1) architects who believe they are producing something magical 2) eccentric customer 3) unfortunate period trends 4) builders trying to save money 4) personal spite (e.g. builder pissed off at city council) 5) attempts to be newsworthy or modern.
A Toronto professor became rich, supposedly after writing a definitively excellent Calculus textbook adopted widely (which has hundreds of historical asides and a violin on the cover). He built a mansion called “integral house” where everything was mathematically curved. It was on the market for millions but did not sell for years - people that wealthy can build what they want and perhaps found his taste too individualistic? Googling the above quote will show many pictures, I’m guessing.
How about the celebrity plastic surgeon specializing in Botox procedures and butt enhancement, who built the house of his mathematical dreams? From today’s Wall St. Journal story:
“Dr. Khadavi said much of the home’s design was inspired by the “golden ratio” and Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci’s mathematical sequence, which some consider the key to the human perception of beauty.”
Unfortunately Khadavi went bankrupt (incurring bloated construction costs including millions for marble and 24-karat gold dust-stained wood floors) and is parting with his dream home at an asking price of $87.777 million.
I didn’t link to the WSJ story because it’s paywalled; besides, the Daily Mail link has a wonderful photo of the good doctor.
I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to look more plastic than Kim Kardashian, but this guy managed it. He could get a second job as a department store manikin.
