Waterbuurt (Dutch for “water quarter”) is a state of the art residential development in Amsterdam, which consists of nearly 100 individual floating homes moored on Lake Eimer.

The floating homes Ijburg district are no ordinary houseboats, but real floating houses. They float adjacent to jetties and are moored to steel pilons, so they only move vertically with the changing tide. Designed by Dutch architect Marlies Rohmer, the houses have a “no-nonsense, basic design” but are comfortable at the same time. They were built at a shipyard about 65 km north of Lake Eimer and then transported through a network of canals. Although the Waterbuurt is still a work in progress, some of the houses are already inhabited.

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The Qiyi City Forest Garden residential complex in Chengdu, China, was supposed to be a green paradise for its residents, but two years on, the vertical forest concept has turned into a nightmare.

Back in 2018, the idea of living among dozens of exotic plants proved very exciting for the people of Chengdu, one of China’s most polluted cities, and by April of 2020 all 826 units in the Qiyi City Forest Garden complex had been sold. Each unit had up to 20 types of plants growing on the balcony, and filtering the city’s air and noise pollution. However, instead of an urban paradise, the eight-tower complex looks like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic film, with balconies overrun by sprawling greenery and plagues of mosquitoes.

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Photos of a so-called “mushroom house” sitting on a narrow concrete staircase have been doing the rounds on Japanese social media and leaving viewers scratching their heads in disbelief.

The viral photos were originally posted by Japanese Twitter user Yuko Mohri, but have since been shared over 20,000 times on the popular social network alone. They show what looks like a one-storey house perched on a very narrow concrete staircase, somewhere in Japan. Such a sight would raise a few eyebrows anywhere in the world, but even more in the island country, where powerful earthquakes occur fairly often.

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A suburban Chicago home has become known locally as the “Pie House” because of its resemblance to a wedge-shaped slice of pie.

Built in 2003, on an oblong plot of land in Deerfield, Illinois, the Pie House has become somewhat of a local tourist attraction, with people stopping by regularly just to take pictures of the unusually narrow building. Famous for its unique shape, the Pie House was born out of necessity, as developer Greg Weissman of Advantage Properties tried to make the best of an oblong piece of land only 0.09 acres in size, which is unusually small for the suburbs. Despite one of the walls being only 3-feet-wide, the Pie House turned out quite cozy, and ended up selling for little over $284,000 in 2007.

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The Indian city of Bangalore is home to one of the most lavish, over-the-top luxury mansions in the world – a replica of the White House built atop a skyscraper.

Vijay Mallya, the chairman of United Breweries Group, has always been one of India’s most flamboyant tycoons, but in 2010, when he announced plans to have a mansion modelled after the White House built atop a luxury skyscraper in Bangalore, people thought it was too much, even for him. He didn’t let that deter him from building his dream home, and by 2016, his mansion atop Kingfisher Tower in the heart of Bangalore City was taking shape. Unfortunately, by that time his financial woes were the talk of India, and it wasn’t long before he fled the country for the UK, leaving his dream home unfinished.

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Stacking 11 metal shipping containers on top of each other doesn’t sound like the idea way to build your dream three-story house, but in designer Will Breaux’s case that’s exactly what it took, and the result is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Why would anyone build a house out of shipping containers, especially one so big as the one located on McGowen Street, in Houston? Well, owner Will Breaux has the perfect answer – ‘why not?’ He had been thinking about it for a while, and after using 3D rendering software to make it a reality, he started working on a real-life version of it at the edge of downtown Houston. Believe it or not, all the 11 metal containers were set in place in a single day, back in 2017, using a giant crane, and Breaux has been working on it every week since. As he puts it, if he had all the money required, he would have surely finished it by now, but as it stands, two thirds of the three-story house is incomplete, so it’s still a work in progress.

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A South Florida Man thought he had hit the jackpot when his $13,000 bid on what he thought was an online auction for a villa, but it turns out he grossly overpaid for a 30cm by 3m strip of land worth $50.

Kerville Holness, a first-time auction bidder, couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw that his $9,100 bid for a villa in South Florida’s Spring Lake community had been declared the winner. However, everything came crashing down when he learned that what he thought was the bargain of a lifetime turned out to be a cruel joke. It turns out poor Kerville overaid for a narrow strip of land that starts on a curb and goes under a wall separating two villas and then out to the back of the lot. Although the appraiser’s site and information on the county’s tax site states that the land has no building values, the buyer claims that the photos used on the auction site were deceptive.

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Hong Kong is famous for its expensive nano-flats, but one property developer recently made international headlines for selling apartments smaller than the average parking space.

Just when you thought homes in Hong Kong couldn’t get any smaller, a local real-estate developer unveiled the T-Plus, a new type of so-called “shoebox flat” measuring only 128 square feet, which makes it smaller than the average Hong Kong parking space (130 square feet). Despite its shockingly small size, the T-Plus housing unit includes all the amenities a person might need, including a kitchen, a toilet, storage space, a refrigerator, a bed and a dining table. That’s pretty impressive, considering that this apartment is so small that you only need to take a total of five steps to get from one end of it to the other.

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As one of the most popular manga and anime characters of all time, Doraemon, the cuddly robotic cat, has millions of fans all around the world, but this family in Indonesia may just be his biggest fans. Just take a look at their house and you’ll see what I mean.

Doraemon is considered to be a children’s cartoon character, Reghina Karwur and her husband seem to have never outgrown their passion for the time-traveling robotic cat. Even though they now have two daughters of their own, the couple still dedicate much of their time to their obsession with Doraemon, and their house is the best example of that. It’s basically a shrine to the Japanese cultural icon, both on the inside and the outside.

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The Russian city of Sochi is known as a popular seaside destination and for having hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics. But what most people don’t know about the seaside city is that it is home to a special type of residential complexes – so-called “Russian Favelas” made up of Soviet-era car garages converted into 3, 4 even 5-storey homes.

Having a garage built into a house or apartment building isn’t unusual at all, but while in the US they are considered annexes to the main building, in the Russian city of Sochi, it’s the other way around. The garage is the main building upon which owners have built several storey residential annexes which they then rent out to migrants or families too poor to afford conventional homes. In order to avoid having to register these bizarre residential buildings as actual houses and paying higher taxes, owners maintain the ground floor as garages, preferring instead to build as many storeys on top of them as legally possible to maximize their profits.

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Science and technology progress so fast that something created only a decade ago will most likely feel like an antique to its present-day observers. This, however, is not the case with the ball-shaped houses in the Dutch city of Den Bosch: they resembled the set of a sci-fi movie when they were conceived in 1984 and remain as futuristic-looking to this very day.

Known locally as Bolwoningen, these bulbous homes were created as part of a Dutch experimental housing program launched in 1968. They were designed by artist and sculptor Dries Kreijkamp in the 1970s and the project was completed in 1984 along with another subsidy winner: the famed Kubuswoningen (cube homes) in Rotterdam, designed by Piet Blom. While the program was shut down the same year the Bolwoningen became a reality, this experimental housing complex continues to stand and remains as wow-worthy as the day it took shape.

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If you’re a diehard vegetarian who can’t bear the smell of cooked meat, or even the thought of living near someone who likes to consume meat, you’ll soon be able to move into a vegetarian-only apartment complex in Russia.

Veda Village, an ongoing construction project in the suburbs of St. Petersburg, Russia, was designed for vegetarians looking to practice a healthy and ethical lifestyle in a community of like-minded people. The first and most important requirement to buy or rent an apartment here is to be a vegetarian. Clients will undergo interviews with sales agents, and if they fail to convince them that they are true vegetarians, their application will get denied. But a meat-free diet is not the only thing required to earn a place in Veda Village. According to developers, smoking and the consumption of alcohol in the residential complex are also prohibited.

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In the town of Ratomka, five kilometers from the Belorussian capital of Minsk, there is a house so spooky that some people try to avoid walking past it at all costs, especially at night. With skeletal hands coming out of the stone fence, devils decorating the roof and dozens of black skulls covering a domed structure on the property, the scariest house in Belarus is definitely a sight to behold.

Photos of the spooky house in Ratomka recently went viral in Belarus, with most people praising the owner for the bold artistic design. However, the only reason that the house even became famous in the first place was because people living in its vicinity had been complaining that it is too spooky. Some of them even filed complaints to the local authorities about it, claiming that the devils and skulls were scaring children and even adults walking by after dark, but they haven’t done anything about it yet.

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After falling on hard times and failing to find a buyer for his home, the owner of this six-bedroom manor house in Lancashire, UK, decided to hold a raffle, inviting people to purchase a £2 ($2.5) ticket for the chance to win it. he hopes to sell half a million tickets by August this year.

37-year-old Dunstan Lowe purchased Melling Manor in 2011 for £435,000 ($544,000), after falling in love with it. He spent a lot of money renovating it, but soon started struggling with mortgage payments, and was forced to put it up for sale just three years later. The first asking price was £800,000 ($1,000,000), but no one was interested. Lowe chose to put off selling it until December of last year, when the mansion was once again offered up, this time for £845,000 (1,057,000). Again, there were no takers, so the frustrated owner dropped the asking price to £650,000 ($813,000), but that didn’t seem to make it more appealing. The house has had just one viewing since, and after looking at his options, Dunstan decided it was time to try a different approach.

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You know housing prices in San Francisco are absolutely insane when the cheapest house on the market costs half a million dollars and is virtually uninhabitable.

It’s no secret that buying a house in the Bay Area is next to impossible for the average person. According to Zillow real estate experts, the median listing price for a detached home in San Francisco is $1.15 million, and the median monthly rent is around $4,000. That’s a lot more than most people can afford, but if you keep an eye out, you can sometimes find better deals. Like this house in the Excelsior District of San Fran currently on sale for “just” $499,000. Half a million bucks is not pocket change, but compared to most of the houses listen on real estate sites, it’s practically a steal. The only problem is that you can’t really live in it.

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