island home

Sweet little cylindrical house on Koh Tao, an island in the Gulf of Thailand –

the ultimate round house

Round houses with privacy, breathtaking ocean views, a fascinating history — and they’re being given away for free — sign me up!

aloha

Indulge me while I dream of living in a round house that looks out over the ocean in Hawaii –

make your home in a dome

Here’s one for sale on Coyote Street (between Fox Street and Bobcat Street), in Opal, Wyoming –

The same house seen from above –

nothing square in nature

A 1920 article from the Victoria Daily, a Canadian newspaper, described the round houses designed by New Orleans architect C.N. Wisner. Pointing to the fact that “nature doesn’t make things square,” Wisner argued that it was wrong for people to live in square rooms in rectangular houses –

 

and what-have-you

Architect Rudolph Matern — sometimes working with architects Herman York, Samuel Paul and others — was responsible for the design of tens of thousands of suburban homes during the US’s post-WWII residential construction boom. He sold architectural drawings for single-family homes via ads in local papers, blueprint catalogs, and model home exhibitions.

Here is his design G-92, a circular vacation home with four extruding wings, advertised in 1967 –

The literal centerpiece of the house was its sunken circular lounge, “a kind of combination living room, family room and what-have-you” –

As far as I can ascertain, the design was never built.

casa higienica

For these surreal times, a house that has been compared to the sought-after bathroom item many are stockpiling: Casa Barría, Panama –

Designed by Mallol & Wolfschoon in 1986, it was built in 1990.

crumbling communist icon

A striking circular structure, Bulgaria’s communist-era Buzludzha Monument has been allowed to fall apart.

a concrete mushroom

Designed by architect George Bissell in 1963, this house was a demonstration model for a nationwide association of cement companies. It was meant to show that concrete homes were modern, inexpensive, fashionable, and easy to maintain.

A “concrete ‘mushroom,’ of unsurpassed strength and stability,” said the house’s advertising brochure, “it is a major step forward in the development of minimum-maintenance housing, as well as a satisfying esthetic achievement.”

The first house in the new master-planned community of Laguna Niguel, in Orange County, California, it was visited by thousands of people when it was first built. All concrete and glass, with a floating, scalloped concrete roof, it was unlike any other house in the neighborhood, either before or since. While it didn’t spark a craze for round, all-concrete homes, as its developers may have hoped, it did manage to find sympathetic owners who didn’t tear it down or renovate it beyond recognition.