Stone/House

I love houses made of stone and always have, so I look for strange ones in slideshows of unusual architecture and am drawn to stories in the weird news about stones and houses. Bingo on both fronts. The house in the 1st photo appears in many lists and was compared to the Flintstones' homestead in a news article. It is located in the mountains of Fafe, Portugal, and incorporates 2 enormous boulders in the design. There is much speculation on the web that the house is photoshopped. I can't speak for that, but can say that the 2nd image shown here is fictional - the work of Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin. Another house that doesn't exist - at least not anymore - was the 19th c. stone house belonging to Irish filmmaker Neville Presho, who returned from New Zealand to find that his 6-bedroom home on Tory Island had been razed without his permission to make way for a hotel parking lot. The court found in his favor this summer, but he has only been awarded $69,000 in compensation. And then there's the family in Wyberba, Queensland, Australia, whose house (with them in it) narrowly escaped destruction when a huge boulder (3rd photo) broke free from a large overhanging rock face. It rolled 150M and came within 50M of the house. A geologist from the Queensland University of Technology said the boulder was a time bomb: "The fracture along which the boulder broke must have originally started some time ago and has slowly spread from the top left to the bottom right until finally breaking completely....It was simply a matter of time." He said the Days would be well advised to get a geotechnical engineer to inspect the rest of the rock face...