An innovative, expressionistic ’60s-era round house is now on the market in Oakland –
Built by local architect Leon Meyer — who designed a number of other round structures in Oakland and elsewhere — the two-bedroom house has a playful zigzag roof, a large yard, and spectacular views.
A spinning, earthquake and hurricane resistant, energy-efficient dome, with a Guggenheim-inspired spiral staircase is on the market in New Paltz –
If you’re not ready to buy it, you can rent it for the weekend. As the owners will tell you, spending time in the dome is liberating.
“People really do behave differently in the round space,” one of the owners says. “It’s just free. It’s free-flowing, free of walls, free of constraints. It’s a space, versus a room, versus a box. There’s no limitation.”
The 19th century Theberton Round House –
In Theberton, Leiston, Suffolk, England.
An Inuit (Eskimo) village, as seen in 1861 –
The illustration is from Charles Francis Hall’s Arctic Researches and Life Among the Esquimaux, published in 1865.
The round house in Bolinas, California, is or at least was a masterpiece –
I have to admit that I’ve seen very few photos of it, and those that I have seen are nearly 50 years old. Yet the house still exists — one can find it on Google maps — and if it looks the way it did in 1966, it’s one of the most beautiful round houses in the country.
The happy result of a multi-year collaboration between architect Robert B. Marquis and woodworker Art Carpenter, the house’s owner, it showcases Marquis’ structural knowledge and Carpenter’s love of wood. Begun in about 1958, when Carpenter moved to Bolinas from San Francisco, the house wasn’t finished until 1965. “It was completely hand built,” said Carpenter’s son Tripp, who grew up there; every shelf, doorknob, table and counter was custom designed and made by hand.
Life magazine ran several pages of photos of the house in December 1966, calling it “a live-in piece of furniture.”
In explaining the choice of a circular form for the house, Tripp Carpenter said that his father had long wanted to do things differently. As Carpenter himself recalled in a 1982 interview with Fine Woodworking magazine, “I was a flower child before there were flower children.”
A recent photo of the Bolinas round house, which seems to be uninhabited –
And, just down the hill, its round studio –
There’s an open house on Monday at 19 Harkle Road in Novato, California: the iconic, rotating round house that overlooks Highway 101 –
Designed and built by Sam Harkleroad in 1963, the house “rotates 320 degrees at the flip of a switch.” Using motors scavenged from washing machines, Harkleroad, an imaginative builder of oddball homes, created a house that would spin slowly, “keeping the sun shining in the living room every day as long as possible.”
And as the real estate agency’s ad explains, “if you wish to change the view you can move the house.”
The house and its ever-changing view can be yours for $3,000/month.
A showy mid-century round house in Jacksonville, Florida, was just put on the market –
The house was designed by Gilbert Spindel, an engineer who sold blue prints for his house designs via advertising in magazines and newspapers. He called this round design “Geodesica,” and it featured in Jacksonville’s 1959 Parade of Homes — a new house showcase event.
Here is an ad for one of Spindel’s more conventional home designs –
A diverse array of traditional round houses — from Ethiopia to Ireland — via round houses on Pinterest –
This energy-efficient eco-house, in Tulle, France — inspired by a yurt — was designed by architect Virginie Farges –
She practiced alternative medicine; he was a doctor. But despite his conventional facade it was he — and decidedly not she — who dreamed of living in a circular house.
The doctor, property-owner and soon-to-be-round-house-builder explained his thinking on an episode of the British television show Grand Designs. His architect sent him a drawing, he said, that was a perfect circle. “I took one look at it, and thought, that’s great; it’s what nature would do: nature doesn’t grow squares … it just grabbed me.”
The story of how this man took a compelling idea and made a house out of it — and how he somehow managed to convince his reluctant spouse to stick with him during the process — is unexpectedly moving.
At the end of the episode, narrator Kevin McCloud speaks about the house’s structure, but he could just as easily be describing the couple’s relationship: “the contradiction between the square and the round is completely resolvable. A building can take opposite ideas and synthesize from them something new and exciting.”
It took nearly £400 and three years of work, but the end result is beautiful.
Russian designers Nasya Kopteva and Sasha Braulov of 52 factory have created a paper clip holder that pays homage to the Melnikov House, an icon of Russian constructivist architecture. The item is part of a 10-piece collection of desk accessories, each corresponding to a landmark of the Russian avant-garde.
Designed in 1927 by Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov, the double-cylinder house was revolutionary in its form, details and use of materials. It was built as the architect’s private residence, and he lived in the house — one of the few privately owned houses left in Moscow — until his death in 1974.
“The house saved him,” his son Viktor told the New York Times in 1990.
A centuries old round house — once used as a pub, and before that a toll house — now for sale in Kettering, Northamptonshire, UK –
The Round House on Bathsheba beach in Barbados is nearly 200 years old. Built as a family home, it’s now an inn –
Shaped like the Hollywood idea of a flying saucer, the Futuro is a prefab, portable, fiberglass-reinforced polyester plastic vacation home –
Somewhere between 80 and 96 Futuros were built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but at least eight have been demolished. Atlas Obscura has put together a map of every known Futuro House left in the world.
The Jero Shelter, a modern yurt from German designer Uula Jero –
Made of canvas, marine plywood, stainless steel hardware, and polyester rope, it can be built by three people in around 2 hours.
The round house in Granbury, Texas, must have been something to see in its day.
Built and designed in 1905 by local banker John E. Brown, it was a mansion with 14 rooms, including a hexagonal grand hall that measured 32 feet across. Each room was finished with a different kind of imported wood, with oak in the dining room, and bird’s eye maple elsewhere. The music room had a concert-size grand piano that had been brought from New York to New Orleans by boat, then overland to Granbury via a wagon pulled by mules.
Unfortunately after WWII the house fell into disrepair. It was occasionally rented by churches because of its large meeting hall, but often left vacant. It was torn down in the 1960s by a builder who bought it in order to scavenge its materials.
