Houses in the Wrong Place (10 Photos vol. 3)

November 10, 2026

By Vidar

Ten more houses that picked a strange spot

One is wedged between two boulders on the Breton coast. One floats on a Swedish lake with its bedroom under the water. One is inside a harbor crane, and one is slowly filling up with desert sand. Two are art. Most of the rest had a reason to be there: shelter from the wind, safety from raiders, diamonds, or an owner who would not sell.

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

🟨 Cube Houses — Rotterdam, Netherlands 🇳🇱

Each house is a cube tipped onto one corner and set on top of a hexagonal tower, above a traffic-free street in Rotterdam. Architect Piet Blom finished them in 1984: 38 small cubes and two bigger ones, all joined together. Curious passers-by disturbed the residents so often that one owner opened a furnished show cube for tours.

💡 Forest Fact: Blom saw each house as a tree and the whole complex as a forest, which is why it is also called Blaakse Bos, the Blaak Forest.

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

🪨 Castel Meur — Plougrescant, Brittany, France 🇫🇷

A stone cottage pushed in between two granite boulders on the headland at Plougrescant, with the tide out in front. It was built in 1861, and the rocks work as a windbreak on a very exposed piece of the Breton coast.

💡 Postcard Fact: A photo of the house went around the world on postcards, and the crowds followed. It is still a private family home, and visitors are not welcome on the property.

📷 Photo and cover crop: Gzen92 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

🏰 House in the Rock — Knaresborough, England 🇬🇧

Four floors of house, one room on each, built into and carved out of a sandstone cliff above the River Nidd in Knaresborough. Local linen weaver Thomas Hill and his son carved it out with hand tools between 1770 and 1786.

💡 Banknote Fact: Hill named it Fort Montague after Lady Elizabeth Montagu, who helped pay for it. His son later ran a tearoom there, fired a cannon in naval uniform and printed novelty banknotes, which had to stop when some were mistaken for real money. It has been a purely private home since 2000.

📷 Photo and cover crop: Redvers / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

🏗️ Crane Hotel Faralda — Amsterdam, Netherlands 🇳🇱

An old harbor crane, Kraan 13 from 1951, at the former NDSM shipyard in Amsterdam-Noord. It now holds three hotel suites of about 35 square meters each, stacked at 35, 40 and 45 meters up the tower.

💡 Hot Tub Fact: At the very top, 50 meters above the NDSM yard, there is a rooftop hot tub looking out over the IJ and the Amsterdam skyline.

📷 Photo and cover crop: Fred Romero / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0), cropped

🛖 Ganvié — Lake Nokoué, Benin 🇧🇯

A whole town on stilts in Lake Nokoué, home to about 30,000 people. The schools, markets, churches and a hospital are out on the water too, and narrow canoes called pirogues are the only way to get around. It goes back about 400 years, to when the Tofinu people moved out onto the water to escape slave raiders.

💡 Name Fact: In the Fon language, Ganvié means “we survived.” The lake kept the town safe because the Fon raiders were forbidden by their religion to attack a settlement on water.

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

🔨 Nail House — Shenzhen, China 🇨🇳

Everything around this seven-story brick block in Longhua District was cleared, and the block stayed. Buildings like this are called “nail houses” in China. Across the street from Shenzhen North Railway Station, its owner held out for seven years while she negotiated, though the building itself was never finished. This photo is from 2016.

💡 Offer Fact: Local media reported she had turned down 20 million yuan from a developer. In November 2017 she took a deal from the local government that she later put at 16 million yuan, and the block was torn down that month.

📷 Photo: N509FZ / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0), cropped

🌾 Uros Floating Islands — Lake Titicaca, Peru 🇵🇪

The houses are made of reeds, and so is the ground under them. Near Puno, the Uros live on roughly 70 islands built from layers of totora reed, moored to the lake bottom and tied to each other with rope. They keep adding fresh reeds on top, and an island lasts about 30 years.

💡 Moving Fact: The islands can be moved when needed, and that mobility was originally a defense.

📷 Photo: bobistraveling / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

🛶 Utter Inn — By Mikael Genberg in Västerås, Sweden 🇸🇪

A little red house on a platform in Lake Mälaren, off Västerås, here with the lake frozen around it. Swedish artist Mikael Genberg made it, and it is also a hotel with a single room. Guests are taken out by boat and left there until the next day.

💡 Bedroom Fact: The red house is only the part you can see. At night guests climb down to a twin bedroom three meters under the water, with windows facing all four directions.

📷 Photo and cover crop: Dependability / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

📏 “Narrow House” — By Erwin Wurm in Dornbirn, Austria 🇦🇹

A full-size family house, squeezed to 1.3 meters wide and parked in the old hall of Kunstraum Dornbirn in the summer of 2011. Wurm copied his parents’ 1960s house in Styria true to scale in everything but width, and visitors could wedge their way into its furnished rooms.

💡 Squeeze Fact: The furniture inside is squeezed too. A later version stands in a park in Le Havre, France, and it is the first one placed in public space with an interior visitors can walk into.

More: Houses in the Wrong Place (10 Photos)

🔗 Follow Erwin Wurm on Instagram

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

⏳ Kolmanskop — Near Lüderitz, Namibia 🇳🇦

The sand came in through the doors. Kolmanskop was a diamond-mining town in the Namib desert. When far richer diamond fields turned up 270 kilometers to the south in 1928, many residents left their homes and belongings behind, and the town was abandoned in 1956. Visitors now walk through houses filled with sand.

💡 Diamond Fact: It started in 1908, when railway worker Zacharias Lewala found a diamond here. By 1911 the town had electric power, a hospital, a ballroom, a casino and an ice factory.

📷 Photo and cover crop: Xenia Ivanoff Erb / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0), cropped