A property developer in the Chinese city of Changsha has been slammed by homebuyers for deceiving them by promising “high vegetation cover” and “park views”, and delivering a public area covered in a blue plastic material to look like a lake.

To say that homeowners in a new residential complex in central China were less than impressed when they picked up their keys earlier this week would be an understatement. Having been drawn in by developer Changsha Shiji Yujing Real Estate with promises of natural vegetation and a “park lifestyle”, they were expecting the public area to look like an idylic paradise. However, all they got was a fake lake made out of a blue, plastic material, complete with a small timber bridge. The pavement decoration does in fact create the illusion of a lake when seen from above, but it’s not exactly what residents were hoping for.

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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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Why travel to a tropical seaside resort when you can have a turquoise oasis complete with golden sand right in your backyard? That’s the question one Louisiana construction company hopes will make its custom backyard oasis a bestseller.

Having a pool or a small pond in your backyard is great, but if you could choose between those and a tropical-looking swimming pond, and they all cost about the same, which one would you choose? Louisiana-based Zydeco Construction, LLC hopes it’s the latter, and it’s willing to create the most spectacular custom oasis to prove it’s worth the investment. 33-year-old Eric White, the founder of Zydeco, claims his beautiful swimming ponds feature crystal turquoise water and are surrounded by fine sandy beaches to recreate the look and feel of a tropical summer destination. They can be made as small or large as the client’s property allows and prices start at around $20,000.

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When the Kesharwani family in Jabalpur, India, decided to expand their home back in 1994, they pondered what to do about the giant fig tree growing in their garden. Rather than cut it down, they decided to build a four-storey house around it.

Today, the Kesharwanis’ residence is one of the most stunning sights in Jabalpur – a concrete villa with a giant tree trunk growing through its multiple stories and thick branches coming out through the windows, walls and roof. Yogesh Kesharwani, whose parents built the house 25 years ago, said that the fig tree is about 150 years old but still blossoms into leaves and fruits every year. Even though they have to navigate around its thick trunk when moving through the house, the Kesharwanis have gotten used to it and even grown to consider it a member of the family.

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The last thing you’d expect to find in the center of a Vietnamese rural district is a spectacular European-style palace, complete with a gilded roof, stunning facade and intricately decorated walls, and yet that’s exactly the sight you’re treated to in the heart of Gia Vien, in Vietnam’s Ninh Binh province.

I know what you’re thinking, Vietnam was a French colony for more than six decades, so this European-looking marvel must be a well-preserved relic from that period. But Thanh Thang Palace has nothing to do with French colonialism or Vietnamese history in general. This opulent complex is merely the residence of a local billionaire who reportedly spent between 300 and 400 billion dong ($12 – $17 million) to fulfil his dream of living in an actual palace. While the interior has yet to be completed, the outside is finished and it looks absolutely stunning.

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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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China is famous for its bewildering and oftentimes confusing highway interchanges, but the Qianchun interchange in the mountainous province of Guizhou is the only one that actually looks like a giant rollercoaster for cars and trucks.

Construction on the Qianchun Interchange began in 2009, but the massive road knot was only completed last year . It consists of 18 different ramps, in 8 directions, on five different layers, with the highest one standing 37 meters above ground. Like the nearby Huangjuewan Overpass, in Chongqing, this incredibly complex infrastructure project has been labelled a nightmare for motorists trying to find their way around.

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A young system analyst from Brazil managed to save about half the cost of building a two storey brick house, by doing all the work himself, instead of hiring a professional construction crew. With absolutely no construction experience behind him, he turned to YouTube tutorials and advice from family and friends.

33-year-old Evandro Klimpel Balmant and his wife Ane Caroline de Jesus Balmant, 34, live in a beautiful 200 square-meter house that they built themselves, in Almirante Tamandare municipality, a metropolitan area of Curitiba, in Brazil. It took three long years to raise the house from the ground up, and they still have the upstairs to plaster, but they say it was worth the wait, especially since they manage to save around 50% what a house this size would have cost to build with a construction company.

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Photos of a small house on the Vietnamese island of Hon Thom have getting a lot of attention on social media for its unique fence made exclusively out of discarded old television sets.

The unusual house is reportedly located on the road to Hon Thom cable car and is very popular with tourists, for obvious reasons. After all, it’s not every day that you pass by a fence constructed out of old, but somehow intact television sets. How those old cathode ray tubes haven’t been shattered by strong winds or vandals is a mystery, as is the reason why the owner decided on this particular material for the fence. Perhaps a television repairman lives there, or perhaps someone just hoarded them and one day decided to put them to good use. Whatever the reason, there’s no denying that the fence is a good way to attract attention.

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A 354-foot-tall waterfall flowing down the side of a futuristic skyscraper sounds like the kind of thing you would expect to see in a big-budget sci-fi movie, but it’s actually a sight you can feast your eyes on in real life, if you’re ever in the Chinese city of Guiyang.

A video of the stunning waterfall, with stream of water rippling in the sun and creating a perpetual rainbow in front of the  Liebian International Plaza skyscraper, went viral on social media this week, leaving millions of people around the world scratching their eyes. Measuring 108 meters (354 feet), this technological wonder is believed to be the highest artificial waterfall in the world.

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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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Levon Arakelyan was 44 years old in 1985, when his wife asked him to dig a potato storage pit under their house in the village of Arinj, in Armenia’s Kotayk region. He obliged, but after finishing work on the pit, he just couldn’t stop chiselling, so he kept at it every day, for the next 23 years.

A builder by trade, Levon was drawn to the rock the moment he started hammering away at it with a chisel. His wife Tosya, who now runs his underground temple as a tourist attraction, says that he was motivated by a series of visions and dreams in which a mysterious voice told him to keep digging. It said that Levon was going to create a He listened, and worked a whopping 18 hours a day, every day, for 23 years. At first, progress was slow, as he had to chisel his way through solid black basalt, but a few meters below the surface, he reached softer volcanic stone which made his work much easier.

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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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A farmer from Southern China’s Jianxi Province managed to move his entire house 40 meters away from the site of a road construction site, by using an impressive system of wooden sleepers and winches.

Gao Yiping had completed work on his three-storey house in Zhouxi Town in 2014, and he and his family had only lived in it for just over a year when local authorities notified him that it was standing right in the middle of a new road construction site and needed to be demolished. The state would offer some compensation, but Gao, who had spent around 1 million yuan ($160,000) and several years building his dream home, just couldn’t bare the thought of seeing it demolished so soon. So, last year, he started searching for an alternative.

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The tiny house movement has taken off over the past decade as urban developers have had to find creative solutions to soaring property prices worldwide. James Law Cybertecture of Hong Kong has joined this trend with their newly released Opod Tube House, made from repurposed concrete pipe.

Hong Kong, one of the most populous cities on the planet, has been especially hard hit as home prices have shattered historical records for 12 straight months this past year. According to the Bangkok Post, an apartment sold this past November for HK 32,060 (USD 6,915) per square foot, making it the most expensive apartment per square foot in all of of Asia. This trend has forced over 200,000 people into tiny partitioned apartments, averaging no more than 62 square feet, and some are only able to afford individual caged beds. Government data shows a 9% increase in the number of households living in “inadequate housing,” including partitioned flats and industrial buildings.

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