FLOATING HOME
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Houses that float on water I live in a house that floats on water, a house that I designed and built from 1997 to 1999. It sounds strange, but it works. It all started with the outrageous cost of land in the San Francisco bay area where I live. My original plan was to renovate an abandoned warehouse, but the land the warehouse stood on typically cost $250K and up. (Remember, this is for a shoddy warehouse in an industrial district. You don't even want to know what the nice residential homes cost around here. Think Rumplestiltskin.) The conceptual solution to the problem of land cost was simple: Build a house that doesn't require land. The execution was understandably a bit trickier. But hey, I like a design challenge. So I abandoned my idea of renovating a warehouse into a home—a warehome, as my friend Tom Taylor calls it—and decided to build one from scratch, without the land. A floating home, similar to the ones in Seattle and Sausalito. Here are some photos of the house. They are a little out of date and don't show the recently completed railings or catwalk, but you get the general idea:
In August 2005 the house was featured on Home & Garden Television's "Small Space, Big Style", on episode #104. They've been replaying the show about once per month—check the HGTV website for details. My floating home is located in Docktown Marina. You can get more information about Docktown and its residents at the Docktown Residents Association website. Here's the website of Arny Messersmith, who helped me build the house. If you're interested, here's the saga of how the house was built. It includes answers to frequently asked questions such as, "How does it float?", "Does it have a motor", and "Have you gone completely mad?" |
