You may not remember the name Mike Oehler, but if you around in the 70s or 80s you may have seen one of the houses he inspired. It was Oehler who built what is considered to be the first “underground house” in the U.S., and he sparked an interest in the concept of eco housing. Hi book, The $50 and Up Underground House Book sold almost 100,000 copies – not too shabby!

The structure in this – which I’ll say right now is very, very bad – video is the house Oehler wrote about in The $50 and Up Underground House Book, and while the property is home to six underground houses in total, this one was his primary residence for more than three decades. Oehler admits that using the word ‘underground’ in his book’s title was a mistake, and since the book was written, people have taken to calling this type of building is now known as “Earth sheltering.”

The benefits of earth sheltering are numerous. They include: taking advantage of the earth as a thermal mass, offering extra protection from the natural elements, energy savings, providing substantial privacy, efficient use of land in urban settings, shelters have low maintenance requirements, and earth sheltering commonly takes advantage of passive solar building design.

A friend of mine happened to be reading The Big Book of Small House Designs: 75 Award-Winning Plans for Your Dream House, All 1,250 Square Feet or Less because he and his wife want to build a small guest house on their property. As we happened to be drinking juice from glass bottles while he told me of his plans, I suggested he build a bottle house. Turns out he’d never heard of bottle houses, and I can’t imagine he’s the only one.

Bottle houses are pretty much what they sound like, namely houses that use empty glass bottles (or jars) in their construction. However, the hallmark of the bottle house is that the glass bottles that provide substance and interest to the walls are highly visible and, in the nicest bottle houses, arranged by color in decorative patterns. Basically, glass bottles are stacked in a binding material like concrete, sometimes packed quite closely together. Other binders might be adobe, sand, stucco, clay, plaster, or mortar.

In some cases, the bottles project into a space like in the house above, but in other bottle houses, the bottles are doubled up in the wall so you see the bottom of a partial bottle on the outside wall and the bottom of another bottle on the inside wall, creating a stained glass effect. The less binder you use, the more your bottle wall ended up being a bottle window. Why build a bottle house? Easy-to-find and possibly free building materials, for one thing. And you can pat yourself on the back for recycling in an unusual way. Plus, according to Wikipedia, “When the bottles are filled with a (dark) liquid, or other dark material, the wall can function as a thermal mass, absorbing solar radiation during the day and radiating it back into the space at night, thus dampening diurnal temperature swings.”

Bottle houses seem to be found most commonly in hotter, drier climates, perhaps because of their ability to regulate the internal temperature of a home, though there are bottle houses and bottle sheds and bottle structures all over the world. Some are made of beer and soda bottles, some older bottle houses are made of bottles that held old timey things like Jhostetters’ Stomach Bitters, and there’s even one bottle house made from discarded embalming fluid bottles!

I go back and forth with regard to my opinion of these most interesting structures. On one hand, they are kind of cool looking, especially when the bottles or jars are arranged in an appealing pattern. But when they’re incorporated into a more traditional home design, a bottle wall can look tacky or gimmicky. Of course, you can’t argue with the price or the DIY friendliness of bottle houses. What do you think? Are bottle houses a yay or a nay?

(Images via: 1, 2, 3)

A three-bedroom, three-story house with a veranda and two living rooms should be relatively spacious, yeah? Not if it’s the unique and strangely slim house designed and built by Helenita Queiroz Grave Minho of Madre de Deus, Brazil. The whole thing is only about one meter wide, though it stands ten meters tall and can accommodate the niceties of modern living, as well as Helenita’s husband, three kids, mother, sister, and pooch.

In the front living room, couches and chairs are spaced creatively along the walls so one can wind one’s way around the furniture, and a desk finds a spot in an otherwise empty bit of hallway… Scratch that, it’s not a hallway, it’s just the house. And it’s such a narrow house that getting furniture and appliances inside meant dismantling them and then re-assembling them once they were in.

As one can plainly see, however, this narrow house is more than a meter wide in some parts. From what I’ve read, it’s roughly three feet wide in the front near the entrance, but widens to six feet across in the back. Good thing, too, as having a functioning kitchen that could feed Helenita’s family might otherwise be impossible.

Could I live in such a confined space? I suppose I could, if I had to. I read somewhere that living in narrow house that’s this extreme would grow to be exhausting, especially with so many people sharing the space, but I’m not sure if that’s really true. Could *you* live comfortably in a narrow house like this one?

Were it not for my having chosen to acquire a husband, a baby, and too many cats, I’d be just fine living in some tiny flat. When I lived in Costa Rica, I rented a teeny condo that was no more than a bedroom that barely accommodated a full bed and an all purpose room with a two-burner hot plate and sink installed. I’m not sure that I’d go as small as these folks, but having lived as a subletter in various New York City apartments, I got used to spending all my time in a bedroom-size space to avoid talking to roommates.

Of course, once you’re comfy living cozy, there’s no longer any reason to limit yourself to stationary housing. Those Tiny Houses can be towed around quite easily with a truck. And there are absolutely brilliant caravans out there! I’m particularly besotted with the restored 1959 Airstream owned by Andreas Stavropoulos. He painstakingly restored it to its former glory, then went a step further, installing mod track lighting, a cabinetry system that allows for quite a bit of storage, cork flooring, and cheerful paint.

It’s parked in the backyard of a co-op, near a garden and some friendly chickens. My only question is, seeing as that Stavropoulos removed the necessary facilities, where then does he poo?

Not in the lovely sink, I hope, bordered as it is with its brushed metal backsplash and deliciously simple cabinetry. There’s a ton of storage under the bed, which is the only reason that the owner’s wardrobe can be contained within a tiny Airstream.

Add in a home office, and you have everything the singleton needs in one tiny Airstream… excepting a bathroom, of course.

(via Dwell)

I’ve never imagined a hamster’s life to be anything but repetitive and a tad dull, but I could be wrong. Maybe human beings are truly missing out by not stuffing our cheeks with food for later or munching on pellets? The truly curious can now find out, for $150 per night plus plane fare to France because a hotel in the French city of Nantes is offering the chance for people to become hamsters. You read that right. People. Becoming. Hamsters.

Or something like a hybrid human-hamster with a flat furnished with a bed of straw and an exercise wheel.

It is the latest venture from owners Frederic Tabary and Yann Falquerho, who run a company which rents out unusual venues to adventure-seekers. Both architects, the men designed the room in an 18th century building to resemble the inside of a hamster’s cage.

“The hamster in the world of children is that little cuddly animal. Often, the adults who come here have wanted or did have hamsters when they were small,” said Mr Falquerho, who was dressed as a hamster.

I think that last bit says it all, but since a picture is worth a thousand words and a moving picture a thousand more, here is a video.

Unfortunately, the Hamster Villa video is in French, but you can probably get the gist. There are cedar shavings here and there. The big wheel exerciser, of course. One drinks not from a glass, but from what the gentleman who created the Hamster Villa envisions a giant hamster bottle tap to look like. The things that stand out as missing to me are those tubes hamsters enjoy running through and flavored wood to chew.

What’s this? An ordinary striped house, albeit one with a somewhat unusual exterior color scheme? Hardly! Once upon a time it was British TV personality James May’s house in in Dorking, UK — he loves Legos so much… well, let’s just say the Top Gear star wanted to surround himself with them.

That’s right, the entire house was constructed using more than three million Lego pieces. With the assistance of 1,200 people, a whole domicile was created, complete with lots of Lego furniture and a Lego toilet that actually flushed. What did the helpers do? They put together full-sized bricks, each one consisting of 272 Lego pieces. Whew!

But May’s Lego house was a temporary one, and the whole thing was disassembled and transported to Legoland, where the pieces will be part of a display that visitors can use to build scale models of whatever.

*sniff* Gone too soon, I say.

Many people look forward to summer’s end for it means a period of slower growing grass that doesn’t need frequent mowing and trees that won’t need to be pruned. Others look toward autumn as a time to plant cold-weather flora or to lay down the foundations of next summer’s garden. Me, I think of summer’s end as a time to let the last tomatoes rot in the vine while I hole up inside trying to adjust to the change in temperature, but I’m a weenie like that.

But if you’re the French botanist Patrick Blanc, you never stop looking for new opportunities to dig down into the dirt. Or upside down into the dirt. Or even sideways into the dirt like he must have done to create the recently completed facade for the Athenaeum hotel in London.

What is it, exactly? It’s an eight-story antigravity forest composed of 12,000 plants from 260 species and covering more than 15,000 square feet. Most are evergreen, but some of the plants are seasonal, and the placement of each piece of foliage was carefully planned to ensure that all the plants get just the right amount of sun.

Blanc uses a kind of techno-trellis as the underlying structure: A plastic-coated aluminum frame is fastened to the wall and covered with synthetic felt into which plant roots can burrow. A custom irrigation system keeps the felt moist with a fertilizer solution modeled after the rainwater that trickles through forest canopies.

Like the look of vertical gardens? Then DIY your own!

There’s some debate in Amsterdam over which house is the smallest, though what I think they mean is narrowest. I’ve found travel web sites and tourists suggesting it’s this one:

(via)

Yet other sources tell me that what we see here is only the rear of another larger dwelling. Then there’s this one, which one traveler asserts is a mere 1.8 meters wide:

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I’ve written about weird houses and unusual structures before, but this is one of the weirdest!

Hang Nga Guesthouse and Gallery in Dalat, Vietnam is better known as The Crazy House and it’s not hard to see why. The base of the guesthouse was built to resemble a giant tree, but more of a scary horror movie tree than a friendly fairyland tree. The whole structure is riddled with unexpected twists and turns, rooms where one least expects them, organically shaped windows, and… er… animals. Stone animals, that is, like bears, giraffes, and spiders.

Built in 1990 by a woman named Dang Viet Nga (the daughter of a former president of Vietnam), The Crazy House immediately began attracting attention. She saw an opportunity, and opened the house to the public, who’d happily pay a small fee to gawk at the house’s statues and pools and oddly-shaped rooms.

Her creative ideas have distinguished the house from all others in Dalat. She notes that the natural surrounding inspired the design. “Living in the Da Lat, the surrounding wilderness inspired me to focus on nature,” she said, adding that in the past, people lived closer to nature, and as a result, closer and more harmoniously with each other.

My verdict? I’d love to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live in it.

I usually go in for nice hotels, unless I’m traveling by myself in a foreign country, in which case I usually like to check out the cheapest option. Usually that’s a hostel calling itself a hotel, and sometimes there’s a pool. Here in the States, my preference is for accommodations in which I don’t have to worry about touching the bedspread for fear of catching a venereal disease. (Seriously, don’t touch hotel bedspreads any more than you have to.)

Now the Madonna Inn on the Central Coast of California… does it fit my criteria? Well the thing is that I can’t figure out if it’s a nice hotel trying to look like a cheesy hotel from the 60s or an actual cheesy hotel from the 60s trying to market itself as a retro kitschy nice hotel!

JUST HEAVEN: “This celestial room is embraced by golden cherubs and kissed in shades of blue to create a little heaven here on earth. An enchanting staircase winds upward into a private viewing tower above the king bed…where gentle rays of sunlight filter through multi-colored glass during the day and soft touches of moonlight linger at night. Graceful French-style furnishings fashion an affectionate ambiance in this heavenly creation for two.”

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