Russian Developer Transforms Boeing 737 Jet into a Stunning Luxury Villa

Located atop a cliff on the Indonesian island of Bali, 150 meters above sea level, the stunning Private Jet Villa by Hanging Gardens is probably the world’s most beautifully converted Boeing 737 jet.

Converting retired airplanes isn’t new. We’ve seen them transformed into homes, restaurants, or even museums, but what developer Felix Demin managed to do with a Boeing 737 on the island of Bali is truly unprecedented. He managed to convert the giant aircraft into a luxurious two-bedroom villa perched atop a cliff overlooking the iconic Bali coastline. The project has been three years in the making, and involved several logistic challenges, from transporting the jet to its breathtaking location to the conversion itself. Luckily, Demin managed to overcome these hurdles and today, the Private Jet Villa by Hanging Gardens is one of the most sought-after accommodations on the Indonesian island, despite its steep nightly rates.

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New $2 Million Water Fountain in Vienna Slammed as World’s Ugliest

A new water fountain in the Austrian city of Vienna has been described as the ugliest in Europe, possibly the world, despite costing 1.8 million euros ($2 million).

Created by the avantgarde Viennese art group Gelitin, the Austrian capital’s newest water fountain was commissioned by local authorities to commemorate 150 years of Vienna’s modern water system which provided the city with fresh water from streams in the green forests of the Alps and helped eradicate plagues like cholera. The new landmark’s design apparently symbolizes the “communal responsibility for water” and while it did win over the jury that selected Gelitin as the winner, it hasn’t done so well with the general public, especially considering its astronomical price, $2 million.

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Stobnica Castle – Poland’s Controversial Modern-Day Medieval Castle

Western Poland’s Notecka Forest is home to one of the country’s most controversial buildings, a medieval-style complex known as Stobnica Castle.

The construction of Stobnica Castle began in 2015, but it didn’t start attracting nationwide attention until 2018, when people started wondering what this gargantuan structure rising up at the edge of a well-known nature reserve, on what looked like a man-made island on Lake Stobnica, was. Aerial photos of a 15-storey medieval-like castle rising up in the middle of a pristine natural paradise about 50 km from the city of Poznan started going viral online and piqued people’s curiosity. What was this building, who was the owner and how had they obtained a building permit for it, considering its location at the edge of a Special Protection Area for Birds (20 species) within the Natura 2000 network?

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Guiyang White House – China’s Largest And Most Mysterious Mansion?

The so-called ‘Guyiang White House’ is a gigantic structure located in the posh Huaguoyuan Wetland Park area of Guiyang City, in China’s Guizhou Province. It has gone viral as China’s largest mansion, but you can’t believe everything you read online…

Featuring an architectural style usually observed in European palaces and museums, the Guiyang White House has become one of the most iconic sights in the Chinese city of Guiyang. Although many have described it as ‘kitsch’, ‘over-the-top’, and overly opulent’, there is no denying the eye-catching appeal of this megalithic structure, both during the day and at night, when it is illuminated by countless light installations. The structure got its name because of its white exterior and Western architectural influences, but when it comes to size, it actually dwarfs its Washington namesake. The entire complex, including the artificial pond in front of the edifice, is said to cover an area of ​​18.3 million square meters.

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The World’s Largest Shiplift Is an Impressive Feat of Engineering

The Goupitan shiplift in China’s Guizhou Province is the largest shiplift in the world. It can lift ships with a displacement of up to 500 tons to a height of 199 m (653 ft).

Dams are characterized by a drastic change in water levels and that makes navigating large waterways a daunting task. Luckily, advanced technology makes things a lot easier, and the Goupitan shiplift incorporated into the Goupitan Hydropower Station is a perfect example. Completed in 2021, it consists of three different hydraulic lifts connected by navigable water channels with a total distance of 2.3 kilometers. Located on the Wu River, a tributary of the Yangtze River in Guizhou, the Goupitan shiplift is one of the world’s most intriguing technological marvels, one that makes shipping along the waterway so much easier.

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Iran Mall – The World’s Largest Shopping Mall

The shopping mall is considered a symbol of American consumerism and the US is indeed home to over 100,000 shopping malls, but the title of world’s biggest shopping mall actually belongs to one of America’s biggest rivals, Iran.

Located northeast of Teheran, the humongous Iran Mall shopping mall covers an area of 31 square meters and consists of seven floors, but its entire infrastructure area measures a whopping 1.35 million square meters and is set to expand to 1.60 million square meters. Since 2014, over 1,200 contractors and around 25,000 workers worked around the clock to make the world’s largest shopping mall a reality. In 2018, the first phase of construction was completed, and 267,000 square meters of gross leasable area and 708 retail units were opened on 1 May 2018. That same year, Iran Mall set a Guinness record for the world’s longest continuous pour of concrete, with tons of concrete pouring continuously for 6 consecutive days.

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The World’s Largest Indoor Marine Science Park Looks Like an Alien Mothership

The Zhuhai Chimelong Marine Science Park in Zhuhai, China, is famous both for its impressive offering of rare marine wildlife from all over the world and its sci-fi-inspired design.

Announced in 2015, the Zhuhai Chimelong Marine Science Park immediately captured people’s imaginations with its futuristic design reminiscent of alien motherships depicted in sci-fi flicks and video games. Described as the largest indoor marine science park in the world, with more than 100,000 marine animals of around 300 species, as well as 100 kinds of living coral split into 10 themed areas. Originally scheduled to open in 2021, after ten years of planning and just over 5 years of actual construction, the giant marine science park only opened its gates to the public this month.

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China’s Eerie Luxury Ghost Village Is Full of Abandoned Mansions

In the foothills of Shenyang, an industrial city in northeastern China lies the mysterious State Guest Mansions project, a real-estate complex of more than 250 luxury mansions, all of which are abandoned.

The story of State Guest Mansions began in 2010, when business in the Chinese real estate sector was booming. Property giant Greenland Group bought up hectares of land in the foothills around Shenyang and began work on what was supposed to be a retreat for the region’s rich and powerful. 260 European-style villas began rising out of the ground, complete with marble floors and gilded chandeliers hanging from the ceilings, but for some strange reason that has yet to be revealed, development stopped in 2018 and the place has been a ghost town ever since.

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This Shopping Mall Bathroom Has Been Dubbed the World’s Most Beautiful Public Bathroom

Tucked away on the sixth floor of a Nanjing shopping mall is one of the fanciest, most impressive public bathrooms in the world. To some, it is the world’s most beautiful public bathroom.

Designed by X+Living, a Shanghai-based architecture firm, the bathroom on the sixth floor of the Deji Plaza shopping mall in Nanjing, China makes you feel like you accidentally walked into a whimsical palace. That’s not usually the feeling you get from most public bathrooms… It starts out with a long corridor lined with plants coming out of the walls. This part of the bathroom was designed as “an immersive walk-through-a-garden experience”, but it’s hard to focus on the green decor with dozens of giant lamps shining on you from above, and with the light reflecting on the glossy floor.

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Dresden’s Massive Tobacco Mosque – A Story of Deception

The German city of Dresden is famous for the Baroque architecture that runs along the banks of the Elbe River, but there is one exception that stands out like a sore thumb – the iconic Yenidze building, aka the ‘tobacco mosque’.

Featuring clear oriental architectural elements of mosques and the famous Alhambra Palace of Granada, the Yenidze has been towering over Dresden’s Friedrichstadt neighborhood for over a century. At 62 meters (203 ft) tall, featuring 600 windows of various styles, and boasting an impressive glass dome, it would be one of the largest mosques in the world, but despite its appearance, the Yenidze is not, and has never been a mosque. For most of its existence, the Yenidze has operated as a tobacco factory and its unusual design was chosen both as homage to the Oriental origin of the tobacco processed here, but also a clever way to vend the rules on architectural restrictions in Dresden’s city center.

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These Grain Silos Are Actually a Cozy Steel Home in the Middle of Nowhere

This $1.6 million unique property in rural Washington doesn’t look like much from the outside, but its unassuming exterior conceals a stylish and cozy interior.

Most people would call you crazy for even considering spending over one and a half million dollars on four steel grain silos in Odessa, Washington, but these are not your average grain bins. As you can see in the pictures below, three of the four metallic silos are connected, which is unusual for this kind of structure, but that’s only because they make up a modern and spacious living space. The current occupant, a local hunter, reportedly spent $100,000 on the four old silos and then another $500,000 to convert them into this rather impressive summer home, which comes complete with a shooting range and freeze-proof pond.

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This Colossal Apartment Building Is Home to Around 20,000 People

The Regent International apartment building in Hangzhou, China, is famous for having a number of inhabitants comparable to a small town, around 20,000 people.

Located in Qianjiang Century City, Hangzhou’s central business district, the S-shaped Regent International was originally designed as a luxury hotel, but was subsequently converted into a colossal apartment building, with the rooms turned into thousands of high-end residential apartments. The impressive building is 206 m tall and has 36 to 39 floors, depending on what you’re side of it you’re on, and as any self-contained community, features a variety of amenities and businesses, like a giant food court for its tens of thousands of inhabitants, as well as swimming pools, barber shops, nail salons, medium-sized supermarkets, and internet cafes. You can find anything you need in the building, so technically you don’t even need to go outside.

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Famous Apartment Building Is Located in the Middle of a Busy Overpass

‘Number 28 on Yongxing Jie’ is an unusual attraction in Guangzhou, China which consists of an eight-storey apartment building surrounded by a busy overpass.

The story of ‘Number 28 on Yongxing Jie’ can be traced back to the year 2008, when a number of buildings in the Haizhu District of Guangzhou were scheduled for demolition in order to make room for a new road. While most of the residents reached an agreement with developers and decided to sell their homes and relocate, three residents of a now-famous yellow apartment building drove a harder bargain, refusing to abandon their homes unless their demands were met. In the end, developers decided to abandon negotiations and instead build an overpass around the building. Today, the story of the ‘encircled’ building is known as Guangzhou’s most tenacious holdout against infrastructure developers.

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Indian Man Builds His Own Titanic-Shaped Villa

A farmer in India’s West Bengal state has been working on an unusual-looking house modeled after the famous RMS Titanic ship that sank after colliding with an iceberg.

Mintu Roy, a man from Bengal’s Darjeeling district, has been dreaming of living in a house shaped like the Titanic since he was a small child growing up in Kolkata. One year, during the Durga Puja festival, he was so impressed with a Titanic-shaped pandal – a temporary structure built to venerate gods during Hindu religious celebrations – that he decided to one day build his own house to resemble the iconic passenger liner. Today, at age 52, Roy still hasn’t given up on his dream and he is working hard to finish his already impressive Titanic house in Darjeeling.

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The Holme – The World’s Most Expensive Mansion

The Holme, a 205-year-old London mansion is currently on the market for an eye-watering £250 million ($300 million), which makes it the world’s most expensive mansion.

Known as the “White House of Regent’s Park”, because of its massive scale and similar style facade as that of Washington DC’s iconic presidential residence, The Holme features 40 bedrooms, eight garages, a tennis court, a sauna, a library, and a “grand dining room”, as part of its 29,000 sq ft of living space.  Built in 1818 by Georgian property developer James Burton, The Holme served as a residence for the Burton family, before being used by Bedford College for several decades. It became a private residence in the 1980s and has been on the market several times since, fetching astronomical prices every time. Today, it is being sold for £250 million ($300 million), the highest price set for any mansion, ever.

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