Tucked away in the rolling knolls of Austin’s affluent Westlake neighborhood lies one of the city’s best kept architectural secrets: the Bloomhouse. Sited on a heavily wooded, 2.5-acre lot down a winding path accented with mushroom detailing, the eye-catching vacation rental promises to let visitors live in a fairytale world of whimsy — if only for a little while.
Billed as “the most unusual home in the world,” the all-white structure was a pet project created by architect Charles Harker for his friend and client Dalton Bloom. The fanciful, energy efficient house is composed of rebar, polyurethane foam and multiple layers of concrete stucco. Harker never drew up plans for the house and worked completely from a personal mental vision, often taking a hand-held pruning saw to areas of foam that he felt needed shaping. Construction began in the 1970s, but it took nearly 10 years for the house to be completed — in Harker’s words, banks were “not used to funding works of art.”
Harker was a part of a ragtag group of hippy architects that lived in Austin during the 1970s, dedicated to inspiring man to live in tune with the environment through contemporary architecture. As Harker put it in a “Good Morning America” interview, “If it’s as large as a house, if it’s something that affects your daily life, then there’s a possibility that you can make art functional in a way that helps a person to grow,” he said. “To become more than he was before …. That’s what I’m trying to achieve with my work.”
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Image Credit: Airbnb Bloomhouse’s organic shape was directly taken from nature: its curvaceous lines rising from the earth are meant to be as whimsical as the wind and imitate the “gentle rise and fall of nature’s melody.”
After lying abandoned and in disrepair for nearly 30 years, Bloomhouse was purchased by former Austin Mayor Dave Claunch in 2017. He then spent a year restoring the home back to its original glory, complete with period specific details. Now, the home is available to rent by the public through Airbnb for $581 a pop. Measuring in at a teeny tiny 1,101 square feet, the vacation rental has just one bedroom and one bathroom, but is able to accommodate up to three to four people. There’s also an outdoor shower for those who prefer to spruce up in the great outdoors.
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Image Credit: Airbnb Stepping into the residence through its heavy wooden front door, guests will immediately find themselves in the living room where a quirky, Kiva-esque fireplace swirls up towards the ceiling. Handmade terracotta tiling covers the floor while sculpted stucco motifs on the walls undulate in organic shapes. A series of steps leads up to the kitchen area.
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Image Credit: Airbnb -
Image Credit: Airbnb -
Image Credit: Airbnb The kitchen features bar seating, a breakfast nook, cherry wood accents and handmade concrete and ceramic tiles. There are, of course, tons of groovy, curvaceous lines and foam work.
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Image Credit: Airbnb Bloomhouse’s bedroom feels almost like an upscale cave. There’s a sunken bedroom design and the room has been decked out with midcentury modern-inspired furniture from West Elm.
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Image Credit: Airbnb Outside, there’s a sizeable wooden deck that looks out into the two-and-a-half wooded hilly acres that the home is set on. There’s plenty of plush seating and the atomsphere is nothing if not blissfully tranquil.
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Image Credit: Airbnb -
Image Credit: Airbnb -
Image Credit: Airbnb In addition to Bloomhouse, Harker also constructed one other polyurethane and rebar structure known as the Earth House that was modeled after a Mongolian yurt. During its own long, drawn-out construction, a community of builders and bums began to live around the Earth House and created a “yurt city.” The spot became so popular, Eddie Wilson, the founder of the famous, but now long-gone music Armadillo World Headquarters, would drop by with musicians like Frank Zappa and Van Morrison. However, it was never fully completed, partially burned in a fire in the late 1970s and unfortunately demolished to make way for the Village at Westlake shopping center.
Bloomhouse is currently available to rent on Airbnb for $581 a night.