Most houses follow the same rules: flat floors, straight walls, a roof on top and a door at the front. The buildings on this list ignore at least one of those rules, and some of them ignore all of them. A few are private homes, a couple are apartment blocks, and one is an office building that was shaped like a basket because the company sold baskets. Every one of them is real, and most of them can be seen from the street, or even visited.
If you enjoyed our tour of real-life Flintstones houses, consider this the modern, stranger sequel.
1. The Crooked House, Sopot, Poland
Krzywy Domek, which translates as “the Crooked House,” looks like a building photographed through a warped lens. Every line bends, the windows droop, and the roof seems to melt down the front like frosting. It was completed in 2004 by the architects Szotyńscy & Zaleski, who drew inspiration from the fairytale illustrations of Jan Marcin Szancer and Per Dahlberg.
Despite the name, nobody lives in it. The Crooked House is part of the Rezydent shopping center, with around 4,000 square meters of shops, cafes and restaurants inside, and it can be entered from either Monte Cassino Street or Morska Street. It has become one of the most photographed buildings in Poland, largely because it is impossible to take a picture of it that looks straight.
2. The Cube Houses, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Dutch architect Piet Blom tipped an ordinary cube onto one corner, set it on a hexagonal pillar, and then repeated it dozens of times. His cube houses tilt at 54.7 degrees, and the idea behind them was “living as an urban roof”: homes lifted above the street so that the space below stays open for people to walk through.
Blom first tried the concept in Helmond, where 18 cube houses were completed in 1977. The better known Rotterdam group has 38 small cubes and two larger “super cubes.” One resident runs a furnished show cube that visitors can tour, and in 2009 the larger cubes were converted into a hostel, so you can actually sleep in one. Just be prepared for walls that lean inward and windows that face the sky.
3. Habitat 67, Montreal, Canada
Habitat 67 looks like someone stacked concrete boxes at random until they reached the sky. In reality, it is a carefully engineered housing complex built for Expo 67, the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal. Architect Moshe Safdie developed the idea as a thesis project at McGill University, and the finished complex is made of 354 identical prefabricated concrete modules.
Each apartment gets its own garden on the roof of the unit below. The complex originally held 158 apartments, far fewer than the 1,200 of Safdie’s original vision, and some have since been combined, leaving 146 residences today. Half a century later, it still looks like the future.
4. The Dancing House, Prague, Czech Republic
In a city of Baroque domes and Gothic spires, one building looks like it is doing a waltz. The Dancing House was designed by Croatian-Czech architect Vlado Milunić in cooperation with Frank Gehry in 1992 and completed in 1996. Its curved glass tower leans into a straight concrete one, which is why it earned the nickname “Ginger and Fred,” after the dancers Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.
The site has a heavy history. The building that stood there before was destroyed in the U.S. bombing of Prague in 1945, and the plot next door belonged to the family of Václav Havel, who supported the project and later became president. Today the Dancing House contains offices, a small hotel, a restaurant, a rooftop glass bar and an art gallery.
5. The Chemosphere, Los Angeles, USA
The Chemosphere looks like a flying saucer that has landed on a stick in the Hollywood Hills. Designed by John Lautner in 1960, it is an octagonal, single-story home of about 2,200 square feet, perched on a concrete column nearly 30 feet high. The design solved a problem: the lot was on a slope of about 45 degrees, which made a conventional foundation impractical.
The house was commissioned by a young aerospace engineer, Leonard Malin, and it is reached by a funicular. The Encyclopædia Britannica once described it as “the most modern home built in the world.” Since 1998 it has belonged to the publisher Benedikt Taschen.
6. The Hundertwasser House, Vienna, Austria
The Hundertwasserhaus is what happens when an artist decides that straight lines are the enemy. Built between 1983 and 1985 to the vision of Friedensreich Hundertwasser, working with architect Josef Krawina, it is a public housing block with colorful patchwork facades, onion domes, undulating floors and a roof covered with earth and grass.
The building contains 53 apartments, along with offices and terraces, and around 250 trees and bushes grow on and in it, some with branches reaching out of the windows. It is one of Vienna’s most visited buildings, although the apartments are private homes, so visitors admire it mostly from outside.
7. The Crazy House, Da Lat, Vietnam
Officially it is the Hằng Nga guesthouse, but almost everyone calls it the “Crazy House.” Designed and built by Vietnamese architect Đặng Việt Nga, the building resembles a giant tree, with sculpted elements that look like animals, mushrooms, spider webs and caves winding around it. There is barely a right angle anywhere.
Nga has acknowledged the influence of Antoni Gaudí, and visitors often compare the place to the work of Salvador Dalí. It is a guesthouse as well as an attraction, so the truly curious can stay in one of its strange rooms rather than just wander the twisting walkways.
8. The Longaberger Basket Building, Newark, Ohio, USA
This one is not a house, but it is too good to leave out. When the Longaberger Company, a maker of handcrafted maple wood baskets, built a new headquarters, it built a basket. The seven-story, 180,000-square-foot building opened in 1997 and was designed to resemble the company’s Medium Market Basket, complete with two giant handles on top.
Those handles weigh almost 150 tons and can be heated in winter to stop ice falling onto the glass roof. The company left the building in 2016, and it has since changed hands, with owners exploring uses from a hotel to mixed development. One condition has come up again and again in its sale: it has to stay a basket.
9. Casa do Penedo, Portugal
Casa do Penedo, the “House of the Rock,” sits in the hills between Fafe and Celorico de Basto in northern Portugal. Built between 1972 and 1974, it uses four enormous boulders as its foundation, walls and ceiling, with the gaps between them filled in to make rooms. From a distance, it looks like the landscape simply grew a front door.
The house was first used by its owners as a holiday retreat, and it has no electricity supply of its own, even though a wind farm stands nearby. Today it operates as a museum, which means the curious can see how people actually lived inside a pile of rocks.
10. The Haines Shoe House, Pennsylvania, USA
Mahlon Haines was a shoe salesman with a flair for publicity, and in 1948 he built the ultimate advertisement: a house shaped like a giant work boot. The Haines Shoe House stands near Hallam in Hellam Township, Pennsylvania, visible from U.S. Route 30. It is 25 feet high, 17 feet wide and 48 feet long, with five stories inside.
Over the years it has been a getaway for couples, a museum with public tours and an ice cream stand tucked into the instep. More recently it has been offered as a vacation rental, so yes, you can spend the night inside a shoe.
What these weird houses have in common
Look closely and a pattern appears. Almost every building on this list started with someone breaking one rule on purpose. Piet Blom tilted the cube. Safdie stacked the boxes. Lautner lifted the house off the hill. Hundertwasser refused to make the floors flat. Even the Shoe House and the Basket Building, which began as marketing stunts, broke the rule that a building should look like a building.
The result is that these places outlived the ordinary buildings around them in the public imagination. People travel to see them, photograph them and, in several cases, pay to sleep in them. For more buildings that refuse to follow convention, see our list of unusual churches from around the world.