Friday April 19th 2013 - Q is for Quirky

This post is part of the A to Z Challenge.

I've always been a lover of unusual and quirky things, especially houses, and if I ever see one which strays away from the normal four-walled property which most people live in it really fires my imagination and inquisitiveness, and I have a great desire to get in there and look round.

One such property is on Anglesey and I've driven past it many times. The original part of the house is the bottom half of an old windmill with a flat roof; there's an arched doorway at ground level and an arched double French window and small balcony above it. Above that is a large semi-circular balcony stretching about halfway round the building, with continuous floor-to-ceiling windows to the room beyond. The rest of the house is built up onto a stone terrace adjoining the side of the windmill, making the ground floor almost level with the first floor of the mill. Rectangular in shape, the end wall has been set at an angle and has three huge single-pane windows; the upper floor, which is much smaller than the ground floor, has weather-boarded walls and a small balcony and looks rather like a tiny bungalow built into the roof. Apart from the weather boards, which are a pale blue, the whole house is painted white and is set in a lovely garden, and it all looks extremely attractive.

The second quirky property I like is another old windmill, this time near a riverbank in the Norfolk countryside. Again it's the bottom half of the mill with a flat roof, and unlike the Anglesey property has no extensions built on. About halfway up the terracotta-coloured building is a glass-walled room which encircles the whole mill and has a small enclosed balcony with outside stairs leading down into the small neat garden. There are two small white-shuttered windows set high up near the top of the building and a door and one window at ground level; the whole thing is very simplistic compared to the Anglesey property but still quirky in its own way.

Taking quirky to a whole new level - literally - is the House in the Clouds in Suffolk. Originally built in the 1920s as a water tower with living accommodation, the huge storage tank at the top was made to look like a house so that it would be in keeping with the rest of the village. When it came out of use in the late 1970s the living accommodation was gradually extended over five floors, and the 'house' at the top is now a huge games room. To add to the quirkiness there's no landline phone inside the property itself, calls are made from an old red telephone box in the garden. As the building is so tall the 'house' is above the surrounding trees and from a distance it really does look like it's in the clouds, hence its name. The whole property is available for holiday rental, but at a price in excess of £3,000 per week in high season it would take a decent lottery win before I could ever hope to stay there. You can check this one out from my House in the Clouds link on the right of this page.

So there you have it - three uniquely different properties which I've discovered while camping and whose quirkiness gives me the great desire to go in them and have a look round, though I've as much chance of that as plaiting sawdust or knitting fog!