House of Leaves?
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The sides of the building don’t look 26 feet long, which means the square footage is kind of hard to reconcile with the outside photos (and comparisons of the house footprint with nearby vehicle sizes), and the interior spaces seem too big to fit into that footprint, too. I wonder if the basement extends beyond the outline of the upper floor, and I figure the interior spaces are much smaller than the photographs make them appear to be, thanks to the use of camera lenses you wouldn’t normally see used for these kinds of pictures. Also, it looks like the vehicles parked near the house in Google Maps either appear much bigger than they actually are, and/or are much larger models of vehicles than one might assume.
Basically, I think there are a whole bunch of optical illusions/photo distortions going on all at the same time here, which makes everything seem weird.
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If you have $525,000 and wish to live in a 3,500 square ft. maze of Home Depot dollar tile in the middle of nowhere, you’re all set.
Ah, but it’s nestled in the middle of nowhere.
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Baba Yaga’s hut is also “nestled”-- when it’s not hunting you.
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It’s not really fair to cut out two whole walls and then complain that the space would be smaller. A regular house would have 39 foot walls, making the total footage 1521 ft^2. About 87% the size of the hexagon house per floor, which makes sense. Hexagons are more efficient than squares from a perimeter to area ratio.
I had the thought looking through the house that this was built by a guy who was trying to minimize costs as much as possible and building everything himself. He could get more space with the same materials by making it a hexagon and only adding a ton more work for himself.
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all the better to show off sweden’s engineering prowess?
In the story of the building’s construction, this power-in-form appears to have had some agency. The architecture with its skewed angles and rhombic footprint holds such complexity with regards to realizing the building that it makes no sense from a functional or economic standpoint. The architectural construction process depended on negotiations with the engineer, on economic factors, technical and material advancements. Yet despite these circumstances, the project remained remarkably true to its original form. The architects, perhaps unsurprisingly, iden- tified this “truth” with an exercise of architectural will: the building was true to its form because the design followed the architects’ dictates. Visual material – photographs, articles, and even the aforementioned documentary film – was choreographed to support this idea. In the latter case they specifically required that the documentary was revised to include sequences that showed the architect Sune Lindström setting down the form of the building, pen in hand, with a single god-like stroke. But the story was more complicated than that. The complex form of the building did not “survive” a hostile, standardizing procurement process. Rather, that process itself was designed and complex; it was a one-off just as much as the building was. The Wenner-Gren Center was not an experiment in realizing a new complex form within an existing construction system; it was an experiment in realizing a new complex construction system per se. [figs. 7, 8 , 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14] (pp 20–24)
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I’m not complaining about anything - I’m just saying, if you look at the first photo of the house, you see one storey and two walls on a landscape that is not obviously the crest of a hill. Based on that photo I’d think it’s a square bungalow on a flat lot, and think I was looking at 1/2 the total number of walls and the entire total number of storeys, by eyeballing the walls’ length estimate that it’s a ~700 square foot house.
Turns out those are only 1/3 of the walls and 1/2 of the storeys, resulting in the true floor space being 5x what I’d estimate from the picture - hence why the interior photos look like they couldn’t possibly all fit in the pictured exterior.
(The next two photos reveal the walkout basement but not the hexagonal shape, so you could adjust the estimate to ~1400 square feet. Still puzzling without realizing it’s a hexagon.)
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Came for the Hounds of Tindalos reference, was not disappointed.
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In picture #21, is that a “live-edge” counter around the sink? Seems like an… unusual… place for one. Maybe they just ran out of tree before they finished the bathroom.
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At least it’s not technically in New Jersey!
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Not a library (though maybe in a sense), but this place sprang to mind :
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Two men enter. One man leaves. 
I’m in my basement right now!
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Outside, the house looks like it’s headed straight toward you… like an Imperial Star Destroyer. (I may have just goosed SW nerds who are in the market.)
When we the first home we owned after moving to the USA, the estate agent took over the Zillow listing and removed the floor plan I had prepared, and also removed appealing outdoor photos of the house from all seasons. I never got an answer back as to why.
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Where’s the video screen where Atrus gives you the next clue?
…rectangle?
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So are we sure the owner wasn’t a 1920s German expressionist filmmaker?
Though then, I guess, the walls and ceilings would also be at odd angles.
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Clearly the owner wasn’t much of a cook. For me the kitchen would make up one of the huge rooms with a view rather than being an unnecessarily cramped galley in a closet.
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