Featuring a truly unique design,  Hang Nga’s Tree House Hotel is, without a doubt, one of the most bizarre buildings in the world.

Located in Da Lang, Vietnam, Hang Nga’s Tree House Hotel, better known as Crazy House, features giant tree trunks and branches that try to trick you into believing this is an actual tree house. In reality, it’s built from conventional construction materials. But there’s nothing conventional about the architectural principles used by Hang Nga, the woman behind Vietnam’s Crazy House.

Daughter of a former president of Vietnam, Hang Nga was confronted with almost no restrictions at all, when she decided to build her wacky hotel. The Vietnamese government simply looked the other way and allowed her to let loose her imagination, without considering rules and regulations. And you can witness the end result in the photos below.

The interior of Hang Nga’s hotel is just as unusual as the outside. It’s filled with unexpected twists and turns, narrow hallways, bizarre rooms and dotted with strangely shaped windows. This is probably why Crazy House is more successful as a tourist attraction, than a hotel. Hang Nga, who lives in her “masterpiece”, tries to convince people to stay at least a night, but most prefer to take some photos and look for a more conventional hotel.

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Spanish industrial designer Enock Amengol has designed a set edible of chairs and a side table that seem stolen from the gingerbread house of Hansel and Gretel.

Sure they’re shaped like chairs, but judging bu their frail look, it doesn’t seem like they can handle some real weight. But, on the other hand, they do what no ordinary chair can: they feed you. That’s right, just pour some olive oil on these babies and you got yourselves some delicious over-sized bruschette.

Baked to symbolize the short-time life of furniture, nowadays, the bread furniture of Enoc Amengol, also known as Panpaati, are 100% degradable and 100% cool.

via Core77

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Named “A Noiva”, which translates as The Bride, the 5-meter-high tampon chandelier is one of the main exhibits at Joana Vasconcelos’ “Netless” exhibition, in Lisbon.

If you’re unfamiliar with Joana Vasconcelos, she’s the artist behind the amazing stainless pot shoes installation that we featured a while back. “The Bride” is one of her most original artworks, made up of over 14,000 tampons, wire and cotton thread.

There’s nothing peculiar about Joana Vasconcelos’ chandelier, if seen from a distance, but as you approach you begin to make out the strange materials she used. Right now, the tampon chandelier is only soaking up the gazes of art lovers, and will continue to do so until the Belem Cultural Center exhibition ends, on May 18, 2010.

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Apparently, one of the globe’s biggest polluters has found an environment friendly alternative to plastic keyboards and mice.

Bamboo keyboards and mice are not exactly new on the market, and I’m sure you’ve come across all sorts of wooden peripheral concepts online. Jiangxi Bamboo Technology Development Co. Ltd., the only bamboo peripherals manufacturer in China, says their products have become increasingly popular at a national level, after they’ve been successfully exported to markets in Europe and America.

Production of bamboo keyboards and mice began in 2008, but until early 2009, they’ve only been shipped to foreign countries. But ever since franchised stores opened in Shanghai and Ningbo, China can’t get enough of its environment-friendly peripherals.

Judging from the photos, the Chinese aren’t stopping at just bamboo keyboards and mice, they’re taking it a step further, with bamboo encased LCD displays.

via Gadgetonian (photos by ImagineChina)

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The Wolfgang Keyboard Bench is designer Nolan Herbut’s of making you engage with a “piece of furniture in a very up close and intimate manner while pressing in the keys.”

This unusual bench is covered with 2,000 keys, all embedded into a layered Baltic birch wood. It might not look like the most comfortable bench, but hearing each key make a clicking sound every time you sit on it, is compensation enough.

coroflot via NerdApproved

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I don’t know what it is about Formula 1 cars that makes people want to replicate them using the most unusual materials.

This time it’s Puma’s turn to make a life-size Formula 1 car out of cut-out shoe boxes.  The cardboard model was created in collaboration with UK-based Ben Wilson Design, and is meant to represent Puma’s ongoing relationship with motorsports.

The cardboard car was obviously very difficult to make. According to Ben Wilson himself, many Puma shoe boxes were used, especially in the development stage. First a real Formula 1 vehicle was scanned, then ‘ripped’ to pieces on the computer, and put together out of shoe box pieces, cut with an oscillating cutter.

The shoe box Formula 1 car is now on display at a Puma store in Chicago.

via PSFK

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The chandeliers designed by Dutch artist Hans van Bentem are anything but ordinary, taking all kinds of weird shapes, like skulls, revolvers or airplanes. But that’s exactly what makes the special.

Everyone who has set eyes on van Bentem’s glittering masterpieces, from celebrities to members of royal families, have fallen in love with them. Madanna ordered a revolver-shaped crystal chandelier designed by Hans van Bentem, to be hung somewhere in her house.

The artist claims he finds inspiration for his work in everything around him, from culture, to history or the daily news. Thus he manages to take classic crystal chandeliers and, while maintaining their beauty, transforms them into something “contemporary and meaningful.”

The smallest of Hans van Bentem’s chandeliers costs around $23,500, but the larger custom models reach the hundreds-of-thousands level. Every one of them is hand-crafted by Czech chandelier-makers, from diamond-shaped crystal beads, according to van Bentem’s design.

Photos by HANS VAN BENTEM/CATERS NEWS

via Telegraph.co.uk

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French designer and architect Paul Coudamy has created a series of 25 limited edition sneakers, made out of wood and named Woodwalk.

The Woodwalk wooden sneakers were all designed on the computer, but were hand-sculpted from real wood. Each pair has its own unique design and looks good enough to wear. The shoes were all created for sports company K-Swiss.

Paul Coudamy’s Woodwalk sneakers are not exactly new, they were created back in 2008, but the awesome sculpting work make them hip even two years later.

Photos by Benjamin Boccas

DesignBoom via bookofjoe

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Stuart Haygarth uses thousands of spectacles and eyeglass lenses to create impressive-looking chandeliers.

The tiered chandelier made my Haygarth is called Spectacle and is made out of 1,020 spectacles attached to an acrylic frame. The artist believes using spectacles, tools once used for seeing, draws an analogy between their old purpose and the new one.

Optical is another chandelier by Stuart Haygarth, made from 4,500 spectacle lenses hanging on a monofilament line.

Stuart Haygarth via VeryVeryFun

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A German company created  a series of sausage-inspired rugs that you can actually place around your house.

Flachbild decide to spice up the carpet industry a little and came up with four cold-cuts inspired rugs. These are just the first out of an entire series and represent salami, mortadella, blood sausage and ham (pimento loaf).

The edible-looking rugs are made entirely from wool, range from one to five meters in diameter and have a thickness of approximately 1.8 centimeters. If you want one of these for your home and can speak some “Deutsch”, check out Flachbild’s official site. Just make sure you keep an eye on your kids, they might try to munch on the rugs.

via If It’s Hip, It’s Here

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Belgian design company dmvA has created an egg-shaped mobile living space, complete with everything a household needs.

The VB-3 Mobile Living Space was constructed primarily out of polyester and features a bathroom, kitchen, bed space and storage niches. The nose of the white “blob’ opens automatically to form a type of porch. The VB-3 Egg is easy to transport and can be used as a mobile home, office or garden home.

via designboom

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Kevin van Braak, a young artist from the Netherlands, has transformed his common caravan into an extensible garden he can take anywhere.

In a world where real gardens, with trees and grass are still available, Kevin’s creation can seem a bit odd, but in a few years, it might be the closest many of us will come to real nature.  It looks just like any other caravan, from the outside, but the artist cut it in two, so it would reveal the lavish garden inside, when open.

Kevin van Braak’s mobile garden comes with fake trees, silk grass,  stuffed animals, an electric barbecue and even bird-songs coming through the van’s speakers. It sounds fake, but the young Dutch says many people prefer his garden over the real thing. His caravan garden is for sale, he just hasn’t fixed a price yet.

via Daily Mail

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What can you do with an old Ford Capri bought on eBay? Cover it in small toy cars and turn it into an art project, of course.

Young James Ford has spent the last two years working on General Carbunkle, a homage to General Lee, the legendary race car from The Dukes of Hazard. He thought of an original way to pay tribute to this popular ride and decided he was going to cover it in red and orange toy cars.

Ford relied on toy donations from all over the world, in order to complete his project, but did impersonate a toy-shop owner to get his hands on 2,000 toy cars. In the end he estimates he used between 3,500 and 4,500 cars, mostly T-birds and Double Decker buses.

Ford intends to auction the General Carbunkle on eBay, so his project can come full circle.

via Creative Review

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From the creator of the internet-famous Hamburger Bed comes an even cooler sleeping installation, the Millennium Falcon Bed.

Kayla Kromer caused quite a stir on the interwebs, with her tasty-looking Hamburger Bed and now she’s back with every Star-Wars fan’s dream bed. Apart from the incredible design, the Millennium Falcon Bed features working headlights, hidden compartments for your every day needs, starfield projection and even cockpit space for you favorite Star-Wars action figures.

I’m definitely not the world’s biggest Star-Wars fan, but I’d love to own one of these…

Kayla Kromer via Neatorama

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Jacob Yarmuth, possibly the world’s biggest Stargate fan, spent $70,000 on a state of the art Stargate-themed home theater.

Featuring a fiber-optics starscape ceiling that shows galactic clouds and comets passing every few minutes, air pocket doors and faux finished walls complete with backlit panels, the Stargate Atlantis home-theater looks like it came right off the filming set. The circular screen is a perfect replica of the stargate and has a 10-foot diagonal.

Yarmuth equipped his futuristic screening room with two Sony megachangers able to accomodate 800 DVDs, Atlantic’s THX speakers seres, two Polk Audio in-wall subwoofers and a JVC light amplifier for HD imagery. Oh, and the airpocket doors are triggered by motion sensors.

Maybe he and Gary Reighn, owner of the Star Trek home-cinema should get together sometime, I’m sure they’d have a lot to talk about.

via Electronichouse

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