The House of Stone: A Casa do Penedo

The coziness factor is questionable, but the epic coolness meter is off the charts. This two-story hobbity dwelling — A Casa do Penedo, or "the House of Stone" — is impossibly carved out between giant stones in the Fafe Mountains in Portugal, replete with glass windows, fireplace, swimming pool, and shingled roof.

The house was built in 1974 as a family's rural retreat, but in recent years it has attracted the attention of tourists and architecture enthusiasts alike for being so perfectly integrated into its natural surroundings. Interest in the stone house has grown to the point that the current owner, Vitor Rodrigues, has had to move to find solace from the curious visitors.

Sadly, recent popularity and media attention has warranted safety measures such as the addition of bullet-proof glass and a steel door. More at Tree Hugger, where you can see a video taking you inside the house! [via Black Eiffel] Thanks, Candice, for the link.

Filip Dujardin

Before he was a photographer, Belgian artist Filip Dujardin was an art history major who specialized in architecture. His affection for structures led him to create his own fictional assemblages, composed from his "photographs of nondescript, often post-modern buildings" by reremixing them "using Photoshop to create strange hybrids. The results may be fantastical, but could never be described as whimsical."

Every montage, says Dujardin, is one project. It begins with an idea for a specific image. Often he starts off by building a model of the form he is trying to achieve – at first in cardboard, but he has recently discovered SketchUp. He then goes on a photo safari, often just around the corner, to find suitable buildings "with a lot of the same things," so that they can be cut and pasted and serve as building material. In fact most of the fictional structures are buildings in Ghent, just resampled. —Mark Magazine

You can read more at BLDG BLOG and I Love Belgium. Dujardin also has a book out, Beyond Architecture: Imaginative Buildings and Fictional Cities.

John Paananen: Suburban Tipi

Half-Finnish, half-Italian designer John Paananen was living in a yurt when he started brainstorming ideas for building a livable hybrid nomadic dwelling on site at his campus, the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. He considered the question, “What would happen as a result of immobilizing the nomadic home with suburban values, materials and methods of construction?" Well, apparently, you get a yurt-igloo-tipi fusion. Paananen writes, "I imagined these holistically designed structures to blister or tumor in reaction to the disconnectedness, artificiality, environmental and social irresponsibility that suburbia is.”

That may be, but there is nothing unlovely about his creation. The structure measures 16 feet tall by 18 feet in diameter and yields 255 square feet of living space. Inside, Paananen decorated with modern furniture, wonderful nature reproductions, and held nighttime projections within the dome. And while it took 3 months to build, his home of 7 months was carefully deconstructed in just 3 hours by a three person crew. It was then transported by truck to be re-erected at a new location. It currently can be visited at AguaFina Gardens International in Sylvan Lake, Michigan.

Read more at Daily Tonic. You can see shots of his original yurt and the Suburban Tipi on his Flickr. [via Notcot]

Log House by Piet Hein Eek

I just love this amazing little mobile cottage by Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek, created as study for music-entertainer Hans Liberg. Check out a great interview with Eek at Dwell. [via the Thomas Mayer Archive. Thanks, David, for the link!]

Tiny Houses

A few years back David and I went down to visit an old friend in Los Osos, who had carefully modeled every inch of her 300-square foot home to be the pinnacle of function and aesthetics. Really, she didn't have much choice, but it was still incredibly inspiring to see such a well-crafted interior of minuscule proportions. Design Boom's post on tiny houses is a wonderful collection of such spaces, breathing new life into the motto of doing more with less.