Houses in the Wrong Place (12 Photos vol. 2)

Twelve more houses where nobody planned on a house

A village tucked under a cliff. A tiny house on a fake rock in an Amsterdam lot. A front door in a desert hillside, a home squeezed into an old alley and a building front hung upside down. Some are art, most are real homes, and none of them are where a house should be.

More: Houses in the Wrong Place (10 Photos)

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🏜️ Cliff Palace — Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, USA 🇺🇸

A whole village tucked into an alcove under the cliff at Mesa Verde. The National Park Service says it had 150 rooms and 23 kivas and was home to about 100 people. The crowd on the path below shows how big it is.

💡 Building Fact: The builders worked with three main materials: sandstone, mortar and wooden beams.

📷 Photo and cover crop: Tobi 87 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🧱 Hollensbury Spite House — Alexandria, Virginia, USA 🇺🇸

Seven feet of blue brick filling what used to be an alley at 523 Queen Street. Brickmaker John Hollensbury built it in 1830 beside his own house, and it is still a private home.

💡 Spite Fact: As the story goes, he was tired of carriages and loiterers using the alley, so he closed it with a house. It has 480 square feet of living space.

📷 Photo: APK / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🚪 Underground Home — Coober Pedy, South Australia 🇦🇺

The front door is in the hillside, and the rest of the house is inside it. In Coober Pedy most people live in underground homes called dugouts, away from summer heat that can reach 113°F in the shade. From above, a pipe and a solar panel give it away.

💡 Opal Fact: The dugouts exist for the same reason the town does: opal mining. The name comes from the Aboriginal words kupa-piti, commonly taken to mean “white man in a hole”.

📷 Photo and cover crop: Lodo27 from Moscow, Russia / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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📏 Quay House, the Smallest House in Great Britain — Conwy, Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Painted bright red and pressed against a tower of the old town wall on Conwy quay. Wales’s heritage record gives the inside as 1.8 meters wide, 2.5 deep and 3.1 high; it was built as a fisherman’s cottage in the late 1700s or early 1800s.

💡 Tall Fact: The last person to live here was a local fisherman called Robert Jones, who was 6 foot 3. The house was lived in until May 1900.

📷 Photo: Suicasmo / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🙃 “Under the Weather but Over the Moon” — By Alex Chinneck in London, UK 🇬🇧

The shop sign is up at the roofline, the front door hangs near the top and the window arches sit under the windows. In 2013 Chinneck turned this four-story front on Blackfriars Road upside down, “For Sale” board included.

💡 Scaffold Fact: Nothing inside was flipped. The upside-down front was mounted on scaffolding in front of the existing building.

More: Alex Chinneck’s Architectural Illusions (8 Photos)

📷 Photo and cover crop: Loco Steve / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

🔗 Follow Alex Chinneck on Instagram

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🏰 Uçhisar Castle — Cappadocia, Turkey 🇹🇷

The holes in the rock are windows and doorways, and the people standing on top give the scale. The houses of Uçhisar spread around the foot of this outcrop of harder volcanic rock, which held out while softer rock around it wore away and was later carved into a rock-cut castle and settlement.

💡 Castle Fact: It is one of the three main castles of Cappadocia, with Ortahisar Castle and Ürgüp’s Kadıkalesi.

📷 Photo: Arian Zwegers from Brussels, Belgium / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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🏠 Nail House — By Leonard van Munster in Amsterdam, Netherlands 🇳🇱

A tiny house on its own fake rock, alone in an empty lot on Weteringschans, next to the Paradiso music venue. Dutch artist Leonard van Munster based it on China’s “nail houses,” homes whose owners refuse to make way for developers, so the new roads and buildings have to go around them.

💡 For Sale Fact: In 2026 van Munster offered the little house for sale. He told NH Nieuws he was not trying to get rid of it but asking what art in public space is worth, and who takes responsibility for it. The lot itself has stayed empty for 180 years.

📷 Photo and cover crop: Ceescamel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🪨 Kandovan — East Azerbaijan, Iran 🇮🇷

The rock cones on the hill are houses too. In Kandovan people still live in homes dug out of the volcanic rock, locally called karaan, with stone rooms and wooden doors built onto the front. The lanes are steep enough that the donkey is the sensible choice.

💡 Age Fact: The village was likely founded in the late 13th or early 14th century, and some of the rock dwellings may be centuries older.

📷 Photo and cover crop: Faridtabrizi53 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

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🏠 Just Room Enough Island — Thousand Islands, New York, USA 🇺🇸

A house, a tree and just enough rock for a few chairs in the St. Lawrence River. The Sizeland family bought this tiny island in the 1950s for a vacation home. The front yard stops almost as soon as it starts.

📷 Photo: Omegatron / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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🏠 Edith Macefield’s House — Ballard, Seattle, USA 🇺🇸

Concrete walls rise around a small brown house, with a blue car still parked out front. Edith Macefield refused to sell to the developers, so their building went up around her home in Ballard. This photo was taken on July 20, 2008. The big project had to leave room for one small house.

📷 Photo: Ben Tesch / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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☁️ House in the Clouds — By Frederick Forbes Glennie in Thorpeness, UK 🇬🇧

A red cottage above the treetops, with a narrow tower underneath. Frederick Forbes Glennie’s 1923 water tower and house hid the tank inside the cottage-shaped top, with living quarters below. The tank was removed in 1979; the building is now a vacation rental. The extra height comes with quite a view.

📷 Photo: Andrew Dunn / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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🏝️ Elliðaey Hunting Lodge — Westman Islands, Iceland 🇮🇸

A white lodge sits in a bowl of green grass above steep sea cliffs. On Elliðaey in Iceland’s Westman Islands, the building belongs to the island’s hunting association. There is plenty of lawn. The walk beyond it is another matter.

📷 Photo: H0rdur.kristleifsson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)