HOME |
RSS | 
Ted Lott builds houses, but not like any house that you've ever seen. In this piece titled "Sit Stay," he took an old armchair frame and turned it into a foundation for a miniature house.
Designboom has more photos: Link | Ted's official website (Don't miss his artwork Mobile Home)
Maru received the gift of a new Kamakura house, which he apparently appreciates. See more pictures at his blog. Link -via Buzzfeed
You might think you’ve seen enough computerized Christmas lights by now… and I wouldn’t blame you. But this is an actual game. Angry Birds, to be precise. Former Disney Imagineer Ric Turner turned his house into the game with 20,000 lights, an FM audio channel, and controller that people can use to play from their cars! -via The Daily What
This beautiful luxury home in New York’s Adirondack State Park has an awesome secret-it’s built on top of a former launch control center, and has an additional 2300 square feet of space which lies safely underground.
And now this cabin/bunker can be yours for a mere $1.75 million! Maybe Bruce Wayne is looking for a vacation home, complete with pre-constructed BatCave? You can see more pics of this survivalist dream house at the link below.
They hardly needed to put the name on the pot -just about everyone knows what they’ll be drinking from it. Link
Who knows? It might be the same restaurant where the cold drink dispensers are labeled with pictures as well.
Just
in time for the boomerang kids and aging parents, homebuilder Lennar is
unveiling a new concept for Baby Boomers looking to buy a new house: a
house-within-a-house.
Alejandro Lazo of the Los Angeles Times explains:
Like a Russian nesting doll with a smaller doll inside, the new residential design incorporates a smaller home with a separate front entrance, kitchenette, bathroom and bedroom.
Lennar designers and researchers and an independent architect developed the floor plans this year to respond to the doubling-up trend that has affected more than 1 in 5 U.S. households. Executives with the Miami-based home building titan hope the atypical designs will appeal to families moving in together and pooling financial resources; the idea is to draw them back into the beleaguered market for newly constructed homes, which is on course for its worst annual performance on record.
It's like a duplex as a new house! Would you buy a new house designed specifically so the kids will come back to live with you?
Link (Photo: Robert Gauthier/LA Times)
This modular house by Michael Jantzen, simply named “M-House,” is made up of hinged interchangeable steel panels that serve different functions. Certain panels are opened to reveal seating, mirrors, tables, and beds and others can be adjusted block rain. Currently one M-House has been sold to an art collector in Korea, but Jantzen is envisioning the structure to be customized for playhouses, exhibits, and even office modules.
Link -via Laughing Squid
This is a real house in Portugal called Casa do Penedo, which means “house of stone.” Built in 1974, the current resident had to reinforce the house with security doors and window bars because of the many visitors and occasional vandals. Casa do Penedo is just one of a list of Ten Strange Places Where People Live, some of which may induce vertigo. Link -via J-Walk Blog
Comments Off
What kind of a house would you build for a pro skateboarder? A skateable one, of course!
Here's what Los Angeles-based architect Francois Perrin and designer Gil Lebon Delapointe did for Pierre Andre Senizergues, a former world skateboard champion:
The house is divided into three separate spaces. The first one includes the living room, dining area and kitchen, the second one includes a bedroom and bathroom and the third one a skateboard practice area. Each space is skateable as the ground becomes the wall then the ceiling in a continuous surface forming a tube of a 10ft diameter.
The furniture is also skateable, whether it is integrated in the curve like the sitting area, the kitchen or the bathroom or just as standing object like the dining table, the kitchen Island or the bed. Closets and drawers could be integrated in the curve too.
The PAS house is the first house to be entirely used for skateboarding as well as being a traditional dwelling. It is the ultimate dream for generations of skateboarders who wanted to bring their practice into their home.
Link - via The Awesomer
Comments Off 
Carl and Ellie’s dream house from the movie Up! comes to life in Herriman, Utah, with Disney’s blessing. At Lovely Listing, you can also see a bit of the inside, too. Link
Comments Off 
According to police, Mark C. Sirben of Spring Hill, Florida, was so drunk that he went home, made himself a snack, and passed out on the couch. But it wasn’t his home. It wasn’t even in Spring Hill -the home was in Palm Harbor! The sleeping woman who actually lived there heard someone coughing in the middle of the night.
The woman went to investigate and found Sirben asleep on her couch. She woke up her husband, who went to the living room and confronted Sirben. Sirben argued with the husband, telling him that he lived there, before he passed out again.
“They had no idea who this guy was,” said Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Cecilia Barreda.
When a deputy arrived, Sirben was still asleep on the couch with a plate of food at his side. The couple said Sirben must have cooked something for himself before he fell asleep.
They found food in a frying pan they had not prepared. Sirben, who has a record of DUI convictions, was jailed for trespassing and criminal mischief. Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: Florida Mugshots)
The Aliens may have been trying to tell us something by leaving those crop circles all those years; crop circles would be a neat design for a house. Jolson Architecture in Australia got the message by designing the Earth House. See link for gallery images. Link
Comments Off 
If corporate sponsorship can save beleaguered sports teams, arenas, and schools, why not houses? Adzookie is offering to sponsor your mortgage in return for turning your house into a colorful billboard! You get an extra bonus if your home already needs a new coat of paint.
Adzookie launched the offer on its website Tuesday — and by late afternoon, the company had already received more than 1,000 applications, according to Adzookie CEO Romeo Mendoza. One even came from a church.
“It really blew my mind,” Mendoza said. “I knew the economy was tough, but it’s sad to see how many homeowners are really struggling.”
Adzookie intends to paint its logo and social media icons onto participating homes. Houses must remain painted for at least three months, and the agreement may be extended up to one year.
Link to story. Link to website. -via Consumerist
For their new TV series How Hard Can It Be?, the people of National Geographic have created a 16 feet by 16 feet house inspired by the Pixar movie Up that can fly for real, thanks to 300 helium-filled weather balloons.
My Modern Met has the photos: Link – via Gizmodo
The 24-square-foot house pictured is named the Gypsy Junkard. It’s the largest of Derek Diedricksen’s tiny house designs. Diedricksen has always been fascinated with tiny architecture, and once challenging himself to build a homeless shelter for less than $100. He accomplished that by using scavenged and recycled materials -and imagination. The four tiny structures he built in his backyard cost an average of $200 each in materials. Outside of his building hobby, Diedricksen is a building inspector who lives with his family of four in a 950-foot house. A fixer-upper, of course. Read more, and see his other constructions, at the New York Times. Link
(Image credit: Erik Jacobs/The New York Times)
Isn’t this an adorable house? You almost expect to see Frodo coming out of it! Owen Geiger built this earthen dome in Thailand in 2007. The main component is bags of soil. You can build your own with his tutorial at Instructables. Link -via The Daily What
The Shoe House in Hellam, Pennsylvania was built in 1948 by shoe salesman Colonel Mahlon M. Haines, who styled himself as “the Shoe Wizard”. Not only is the house shaped like a shoe, but each window has stained glass images of shoes! Read about the building’s history at Roadside America. Link -Thanks, Greg Ross!
Think that housing prices are outrageous? Check out this billion (yes, you read that right: $1,000,000,000) house owned by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani:
Need to cool off after the stressful drive? Of course there’s a swimming pool and yoga studio. Or, by some accounts, an ice room to escape the Mumbai heat, infused with man-made snow flurries. Then there’s the mini-theater, three balconies with terrace gardens, the health club, spectacular views of the Arabian Sea (and the Mumbai slums). [...]
Sedate isn’t an obvious description for the new building, which reportedly requires 600 staff members to keep Ambani, wife Nita, their three children and Ambani’s mother in the style they’ll soon become accustomed to.
The rather awkward-looking structure was designed by U.S. architects using principles of Vaastu, Indian traditional geomancy akin to Chinese feng shui, to maximize "positive energy." No two floor plans are alike, and the materials used in each level vary widely, driving up the cost.
600 staff for a family of 5? Why, that’s downright silly – you’d only need 200 tops, otherwise it’s just extravagance. Mark Magnier of the Los Angeles Times has more: Link (Photo: Danish Siddiuqui/Reuters)
This Halloween, Neatorama’s already given you costume ideas and spooky food inspirations, so now it’s time to think about your home decoration. Whether you’re planning to decorate for a killer Halloween party or just want to impress the local trick and treaters, these cool geektastic decoration ideas are sure to impress.
Because pumpkins are one of the most critical elements of Halloween decorations and because there are about a billion pumpkin galleries online, the first half of our decoration ideas focus exclusively on Jack-O-lanterns. If you’ve already got your carving planned or are sick of looking at orange sculptures, then feel free to skip further down.
Video link
When you want to do something more techy, try making your own LED pumpkin with an artificial pumpkin wired with lights and controlled externally so you can change the expression at will.
To take LED lights to a new level, you can always try installing circuitry that will tell your pumpkin to turn on when it is dark. While I haven’t seen this done, I think a motion detecting light would also be pretty awesome. Any readers want to give it a shot?
Video link
When you want to go a step beyond LED lights, try buying a mini-pumpkin and engineering it to snap its mouth at passers by. This is also a good decoration for your cubicle since it doesn’t take up much space but is sure to get a lot of attention.
Video link
While there are plenty of pumpkins that look like robots, this is the only one I have seen so far that actually is a robot.
I know you Neatonauts are torn on the whole steampunk thing, but those who do like the art form are sure to appreciate this awesome steampunk pumpkin.
Here’s every kid’s dream: A house in Jakarta, designed by Indonesian architect Aboday, features a spiral concrete slide so the family kid can get down to the kitchen from his bedroom in a jiffy!
Don’t you wish your parents were this hip? Link | More at Dezeen
In 1991, star trend tracker Faith Popcorn wrote The Popcorn Report. The book was a best seller that offered a catchy list of future trends she foresaw. Included in her list was a trend she named “cocooning” which reflected “…the need to protect oneself from the unpredictable, the stressful and often hostile, outside environment.” In the Glossary she added an extreme form of cocooning, “burrowing”. Burrowing would be “..the ultimate expression of Cocooning in which consumers dig in, ever deeper, with a bunker mentality.”
While Faith was writing The Popcorn Report, I was burrowing at home in Sacramento, California, creating Public Therapy Buses, Information Specialty Bums, Solar Cook-A-Mats and Other Visions of the 21st Century. The book was published the same year as The Popcorn Report. I was essentially tracking the same trend.
I depicted a future product called the Television Life Support System:
Cautious Americans, sensing danger at every turn, may seek the passive, indrawn personal life of the television spectator, or “couch potato.” Superchairs are sold that can be customized to meet almost every need.
In the same chapter I showed the TV Sleeping Chambers, a cocoon-shaped piece of furniture specially suited to the needs of selfish teenage boys and juvenile males in general. I wrote:
Addiction to television, a disease, can lead individuals to buy bullet-proofed, sound-deadening television-watching cocoons.
In the 1990s I continued to think up home furnishings that incorporated aspects of cocooning. The Potato Couch Room Group allowed one to get comfortable inside a snuggly, split-open baked potato while at home watching TV.
I learned something new at Neatoramanaut Minnesotastan’s excellent but unpronounceable blog TYWKIWDBI every day, like this architectural oddity called the Witch Window.
In American vernacular architecture, a witch window (also known as a Vermont window, a coffin window, or a sideways window) is a window (usually a double-hung sash window, occasionally a single-sided casement window) placed in the gable-end wall of a house and rotated approximately 1/8 of a turn (45 degrees) from the vertical, leaving it diagonal, with its long edge parallel to the roof slope. This technique allows a builder to fit a full-sized window into the long, narrow wall space between two adjacent roof lines. These windows are found almost exclusively in or near the U.S. state of Vermont, principally in farmhouses from the 19th century…
Photo: Nomeus / Flurbex
Before he became one of FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives, Osama bin Laden was actually a frequent tourist to the United States, visiting family in Florida. Now, Osama’s family mansion lies empty as you can see in this fascinating post about abandoned homes of the world’s "super villains", over at Dark Roasted Blend:
This house was the residence of Bin Laden’s nephew in Florida. Osama was a frequent guest there. 17+ acres, 1.5 million dollars, built in the 1920s … Not much is known about the house itself. As for why is it abandoned: according to this source, the government flew the nephew and his family out right after 9/11 (or not). The house spent a few years on the market, but there were no taker
For a time in the late 1950s while I was an undergraduate in college, I studied architecture. I wanted badly to be an architect. Yet the world is a better place than it might have been had I taken up the field! The field of architecture is no place for persons like me who run too easily after strange ideas.
Take my Punk Roofs for example. Please, someone, take them! It is not all that difficult to conceive of a neighborhood where “keeping up with the Joneses” means having a weirder roof than one’s neighbor. Yet can you imagine the upkeep and maintenance issues? How does one clean such a roof? How much insurance would roofers need before they climbed up a ladder to re-shingle a roof, or re-sharpen a roof’s spines? What would happen if a balloon full of tourists, operated by a nearby hot air balloon concession, lost power and sank into this neighborhood?
America is a strange place. It is a great and wonderful place that allows odd fads, cults, communes and crazy Utopian villages to thrive. It is a place where adults live basically without supervision much of the time. Since Americans are so into their cars – the rest of the world will never be able to compete with the U.S. in automobile fanaticism – I reasoned that an entire village could be built that would simulate the experience of being in one’s car or motorhome every day of the year. The concept above shows a happy couple inside their Auitohome, waking up to the recorded sounds of cars at rush hour. A mist-spraying device emits a non-toxic perfume that mimics the smell of exhaust fumes and motor oil. The village that I imagine is on a pleasant, sunny hillside. The occupants do not actually need to go anywhere. One of their rooms, fitted out like the interior of an automobile, would provide a Naugahyde-lined office space with computer and Internet, perfect for fulltime telecommuting.
I have always believed that no dumb concept is worth leaving unexplored. Here, I tried turning useless attic space into an upper-floor garage. It could be argued that this concept, which requires steel girder construction to support the attic garage and ramped driveways, simply creates new, and even more useless, spaces. It could be argued that the entire house would vibrate when the breadwinner pulled into the garage after coming home from work. It could be argued that this idea has few virtues.
(Image credit: F.B. Johnston)
Look at that massive chimney! Can you imagine the size of the fireplaces inside? This is Windsor Shades in King William County, Virginia. In colonial times, it was a tavern, one of George Washington’s favorite hangouts. Read more about this unique house at TYWKIWDBI. Link
This dust bunny is one of the many household creatures that bedevil Christoph Niemann in this funny photo essay. You’ve probably seen some of them in your home, too! Link -via Boing Boing
A beautiful 1927 colonial-style waterfront home with 5 bedrooms, 3 and a half baths, and a ton of history behind it in Long Island can be yours for as little as $1,150,000. The home has had many owners, some more notorious than others.
The home gained its notoriety when Ronald DeFeos killed six family members while they were sleeping in 1974 and subsequent owners George and Kathleen Lutz claimed to be haunted for 28 days, which were detailed in the book “The Amityville Horror” (on the cover: “This book will scare the hell out of you”—Kansas City Star). However, James Cromarty, who lived in the house after the Lutzes were foreclosed upon, “Nothing weird ever happened, except for people coming by because of the book and the movie.”
Link to story. Link to listing. -via YesButNoButYes
Italian designer and architect Duilio Forte designed and built his own house: a suspended folly, made in wood, that floats over the periphery of Milan. As other artists and architects before him, Forte overlaps life and creative work, generating a visionary and fascinating set of works, which are slowly and progressively morphing, adapting themselves to time and change. As Forte stated his house is “more similar to a bird’s nest than a cold concrete box.”
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
A home built underground that still has a breathtaking view! This is green living presented in totally inovative way. You’ll find this home in Vals, Switzerland, a design of SeArch and Christian Müller Architects.
Link – via planetoddity
(image credit: Iwan Baan)
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
In 1997, home developer Kaufman & Broad built a house in Henderson, Nevada that looks exactly like the house that the Simpson family lives in, both inside and outside, including furniture and pictures on the walls. From an article in The Las Vegas Sun, written at the time of construction:
“The Simpsons”, the satirical, animated clan who put the phrases “Doh!” and “Eat my shorts” into the national vernacular, are celebrating their 10th year on television. And in true Simpson fashion, the producers of the show are doing the unexpected – recreating the family’s two-story domicile right down to the throw rugs. Builder Kaufman & Broad has taken the 724 Evergreen Terrace address out of two dimensions and cast it in three, placing it smack dab in the middle of Henderson, Nev., in a housing development appropriately called “Springfield.”
News Story and Gallery via GearFuse
