Nautilus House – Mexico City, Mexico
This beautiful house, designed to look like the shell for which the builders named it, sports a grand opening through stained glass leading to a living room embedded with deep green flowers and a tree, as well as three floors with a master bedroom and bath, a study, a den and a spare room to do whatever with. The builders actually intended the curvy structure of the house to make the inhabitant feel like a snail in a shell.

The Ideal Palace ( Le Palais idéal) – Hauterives, France
Inspired by a stone he tripped over in 1879, French postman Ferdinand Cheval built the Ideal Palace as his dream home. For 35 years Cheval collected stones on his mail rounds, holding them in his pockets, baskets and wheelbarrows. The entire palace consists of millions of stones Cheval collected and placed. He even went on to build his own mausoleum in the Hauterives cemetery, in which his body now lays.

The Truffle (La Trufa) – Costa de Morte, Spain
To construct this incredibly small holiday home, builders poured concrete over small bales of hay. When the concrete finished drying, a cow named Pauline took a year to eat it all. Builders cut off the ends of the house to put in a window on the front and door on the back and used one of the cut pieces for a bench nearby. Designed to blend in with the surrounding nature, the outside of the house matches the style of rock in the area, and the inside gives off the feeling of a carved out cave. The house, at a mere 50 cubic meters, contains only a small shower and sink, a couch and a bed.

Wilkinson Residence – Portland, Oregon
Rising into the canopy of Portland’s forest, the Wilkinson Residence evokes the sense of living in a tree house, though the base of the house remains on the ground. The natural wood and circular passages throughout the house further enhance that feeling, truly immersing the residents in nature. The designer of the house, Robert Harvey Oshatz, who has created numerous other houses with similar elements as those of the Wilkinson Residence, intended for the house to also address the flow of music, making the true complexity of the design hard to capture with still pictures.

Wooden Skyscraper – Arkhangelsk, Russia
Built by former gangster Nikolai Sutyagin, the Wooden Skyscraper began as a two-story house. After visiting Norway and Japan, Sutyagin felt he hadn’t used the space of his roof efficiently, so he added three floors. He then thought the house looked like a mushroom, so he added more floors. And he kept going until he reached 12 stories. Unfortunately the behemoth house has fallen into dilapidation after Sutyagin lost his wealth, though he and his wife continue to live on the bottom floor.