My nominee for most incredible, interesting and imaginative home ever. Period.
I stumbled across it on a green homes for sale site.
Yes, there is a little voice in my conscience that wonders if it's appropriate to build a home in a former Anasazi village. But it was a dwelling. It is again. That seems far more reasonable to me than other possible uses or abuses.
But seriously - can you imagine waking up in that house? Coming home from the store and realizing that's home?
I have also been madly in love with earthships for a long time.
If you're not familiar with them, they're off-grid, totally self sufficient homes made from recycled tires, rammed earth and old bottles. They've got a unique, whimsical, organic shape to them and the many colors of bottles create amazing light play both inside and out.
There's a village of them outside Taos, New Mexico and my daughter and I stopped and took a house tour a couple of years back. Amazing. Curved walls, recycling systems for water, indoor greenhouses, lots of sunlight. This very cool one is currently for sale.
But earthships are usually found in communities and I am, at heart, anti-social. I fear that if I ever lived in my earthship, I'd find myself eventually wishing that my home actually was a ship so I could move it farther away from my neighbors.
I also adore old houses and am convinced that most homes built today don't have a tenth of the quality or character. So I'm caught between last century and the next, and I wonder why we are so stuck in building styles and materials that don't make sense.
Why are new homes built with oil and propane heat? What's the point? Why are we so slow to embrace new, greener insulations, heating systems, building styles?
Solar doesn't work for everyplace, but there's also wind, geothermal, fuel cells. But drive into a newly constructed neighborhood and you see either little boxes or McMansions, nearly all of them heated by fossil fuel. It's kind of like offering someone a spiffy new Edsel...why would you want to invest so much in something that's already ancient technology?
I like the cave, personally.
But I could also learn to love this one in Idaho. I've always been a sucker for silos.
