If you’re a diehard vegetarian who can’t bear the smell of cooked meat, or even the thought of living near someone who likes to consume meat, you’ll soon be able to move into a vegetarian-only apartment complex in Russia.

Veda Village, an ongoing construction project in the suburbs of St. Petersburg, Russia, was designed for vegetarians looking to practice a healthy and ethical lifestyle in a community of like-minded people. The first and most important requirement to buy or rent an apartment here is to be a vegetarian. Clients will undergo interviews with sales agents, and if they fail to convince them that they are true vegetarians, their application will get denied. But a meat-free diet is not the only thing required to earn a place in Veda Village. According to developers, smoking and the consumption of alcohol in the residential complex are also prohibited.

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In the town of Ratomka, five kilometers from the Belorussian capital of Minsk, there is a house so spooky that some people try to avoid walking past it at all costs, especially at night. With skeletal hands coming out of the stone fence, devils decorating the roof and dozens of black skulls covering a domed structure on the property, the scariest house in Belarus is definitely a sight to behold.

Photos of the spooky house in Ratomka recently went viral in Belarus, with most people praising the owner for the bold artistic design. However, the only reason that the house even became famous in the first place was because people living in its vicinity had been complaining that it is too spooky. Some of them even filed complaints to the local authorities about it, claiming that the devils and skulls were scaring children and even adults walking by after dark, but they haven’t done anything about it yet.

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After falling on hard times and failing to find a buyer for his home, the owner of this six-bedroom manor house in Lancashire, UK, decided to hold a raffle, inviting people to purchase a £2 ($2.5) ticket for the chance to win it. he hopes to sell half a million tickets by August this year.

37-year-old Dunstan Lowe purchased Melling Manor in 2011 for £435,000 ($544,000), after falling in love with it. He spent a lot of money renovating it, but soon started struggling with mortgage payments, and was forced to put it up for sale just three years later. The first asking price was £800,000 ($1,000,000), but no one was interested. Lowe chose to put off selling it until December of last year, when the mansion was once again offered up, this time for £845,000 (1,057,000). Again, there were no takers, so the frustrated owner dropped the asking price to £650,000 ($813,000), but that didn’t seem to make it more appealing. The house has had just one viewing since, and after looking at his options, Dunstan decided it was time to try a different approach.

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You know housing prices in San Francisco are absolutely insane when the cheapest house on the market costs half a million dollars and is virtually uninhabitable.

It’s no secret that buying a house in the Bay Area is next to impossible for the average person. According to Zillow real estate experts, the median listing price for a detached home in San Francisco is $1.15 million, and the median monthly rent is around $4,000. That’s a lot more than most people can afford, but if you keep an eye out, you can sometimes find better deals. Like this house in the Excelsior District of San Fran currently on sale for “just” $499,000. Half a million bucks is not pocket change, but compared to most of the houses listen on real estate sites, it’s practically a steal. The only problem is that you can’t really live in it.

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Three years ago, Brian Sullivan and his wife Starla lived in a rented apartment that cost them $1,500 a month plus utilities. At one point they decided it wasn’t worth it anymore, so they bought an old school bus and turned into a comfy home for their big family.

It was in March 2014 that 29-year-old Brian and his wife Starla, 26,  of Renton, Washington, got tired of wasting so much money on rent. The apartment was over an hour away from Brian’s workplace, and he had to work overtime just so they could afford the rent. Plus, they wanted to be homeowners and spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos of people building their own tiny houses, or converting all kinds of things into comfortable living spaces. It was one of these videos that convinced them to take a leap of faith, so in April 2014, they bought a disused school bus for $2,800, and spent another $30,000 turning it into a home for their three kids.

“The apartment was about an hour away from Brian’s work and the commute was awful,” Starla says. “He would work overtime trying to pay the rent, then he would sit in a car for three hours and we would never see him, so we decided to make a change. We pay a third of the cost now and we have money to pay off debts and student loans!”

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It’s hard to believe that a family with no construction experience could build a two-storey, five-bedroom house all by themselves, by watching tutorials on YouTube, but Cara Brookins and her four kids are living proof that it can be done. Their amazing story is now the subject of a book – ‘Rise, How a House Built a Family’.

In 2008, Cara Brookins took her four children (ages 7, 15, 11 and 2) and left her abusive husband in search of a better life. They moved into a tiny home outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, for a while, while they looked for place that could comfortably house her four kids. Her initial plan was to buy a house, but she quickly realized that they were either too expensive or too small for their needs. One day, they passed by a house ravaged by a tornado that had all of its inner workings exposed. It was this sight that inspired them to undertake a challenge that would change their lives.

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A 50-year-old woman has apparently been living in Changi Airport, Singapore, for the last eight years, despite owning her own three-room apartment, which she rents out for about $1,000 a month.

The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, told Singapore newspaper Lianhe Wanbao that she moved into Changi Airport in 2008, after being hit hard by the global financial crisis. “At the time, I was stuck in a rut and had no other choice,” she said, adding that in the beginning she was terrified by the idea of living in an airport, and only planned to do it for a short period of time, until she got back on her feet. She rented out her three-room apartment and leaned to survive in an environment that she quickly learned provides a person with pretty much everything they need. She apparently became quite comfortable with her new home, as those few nights she originally planned for turned into eight years.

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Ajay Munot, a rich businessman in Maharashtra, India, has recently built and donated 90 houses to the poor, instead of spending the money on a lavish wedding for his daughter.

Munot had been planning to spend Rs 70-80 lakh ($115,000) on his daughter Shreya’s wedding, but after consulting with a local politician, he decided there was a better way to spend all that money. Apparently, the grains and cloth trader realized that investing in a one day event, including booking hotel rooms for all the guests was unnecessary, especially with all the poor people in need of real help. So he asked Prakash Bamb, a family friend and member of the Legislative Assembly for advice on how best to spend that money.

They both agreed that providing slum dwellers of their town with their own houses was the best idea. Munot began constructing 108 houses on two acres of land, with the goal of completing them by the day of his daughter’s wedding. He only managed to finish 90 of them by the big day, and the bride and groom, who were very supportive of the businessman’s initiative, were the ones who handed the keys to the carefully selected beneficiaries.

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Urban Rigger, a housing and architect firm in Denmark, has come up with an eco-friendly way to provide affordable and comfortable accommodations to cash-strapped students living in big cities. Their innovative “container dorms” are made up of modified shipping containers floating on a platform in urban harbors.

For many students, having to save money for rent every month is one of the most stressful aspect of their lives, but for a few hundred lucky youths studying in Copenhagen, things are about to get a lot easier. Urban Rigger hopes to ease the financial burden on students by building ingenious modular container homes that only cost $600 a month. In the Danish capital, that’s practically a steal.

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A divorced Russian couple recently made headlines after they split their expensive mansion in half with a brick wall, which left the ex-wife unable to access the upper floors on her half because the stairway is on her former partner’s side.

After their divorce, Margareta Tsvitnenko, 45, and her former spouse, Sergei, were ordered to split the three-storey property in half. They have been in several legal battles since they decided to break up, in 2010, and the woman claims that Sergei has tried to force her and their 12-year-old disabled son out of the house several times, by disabling the heating system during winter time. But recently, he came up with a new, more effective way of causing her trouble. After the court approved his request to separate his side of the mansion with a wall, he quickly brought in a team of workers who bricked up all connecting doors and other access areas including the only staircase to the upper floors.

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Unable to afford a proper home after getting married, a Chinese couple moved into a mountain cave near the city Nanchong, and have been living there for the past 54 years.

81-year-old Liang Zifu and 77-year-old Li Suying found the cave three years after their wedding, and since they couldn’t afford to buy a real house, decided to make it their home and start a family there. In the beginning, they shared the unusual abode with three other families, who have since moved out, as have the couple’s four children, but the two elderly cave-dwellers won’t even consider leaving. After their story went viral in Chinese media, local authorities tried to persuade them to move out and even offered to provide them with a more comfortable house, but they flat-out refused.

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Unable to afford the soaring apartment prices in San Francisco, 25-year-old illustrator Peter Berkowitz built himself a box to serve as his bedroom. Living in the 8×3.5×4.5-foot ‘bedroom pod’ now costs him less than $500 a month.

Berkowitz had originally planned to share a two-bedroom apartment with a friend in the city, but later realised that he wasn’t going to be able to afford it. “I was far too optimistic at first that we could find a place that wouldn’t cost a fortune,” he told Business Insider. “It didn’t take long to realise that that wasn’t a feasible plan though.”

After a bit of brainstorming, Berkowitz recalled his experience of climbing into a model of a Japanese ‘capsule’ hotel at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York. That memory led him to a unique solution to his housing problem – he decided to share a one-bedroom apartment with his friend instead, and build a wooden box in the living room to be used as the second bedroom. “Two people looking for a one-bedroom apartment makes the city a lot less scary,” he explained.

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Since June last year, a Dutch family has been living in a wooden cabin in Rotterdam that’s built inside of a large greenhouse. Inhabited by botanical stylist Helly Scholten, her husband, their two teenage daughters, and their pet dog, ‘Concept House’ presents the perfect example of sustainability in the modern world. Not only does it reduce energy costs by trapping heat, it also allows the Scholtens to grow their own food in a rooftop vegetable garden.

Helly, who decorates photo shoots and events with plants and flowers, had always dreamed of living off-grid in an environmentally friendly home. But she wanted the home to be located in Rotterdam, the second-largest city in the Netherlands. That was next to impossible, given that the city has long since embraced modern architecture.

She had almost given up on her dream, but in an incredible stroke of luck, Helly found out that a group of students at Rotterdam University were building experimental houses, one of which was inside a greenhouse. This was exactly what Helly wanted, so she didn’t waste any time contacting the head of the project. “We met a professor at the university’s Sustainable Building Technology program and he said he was looking for a ‘test family’ for a new sustainable home,” she said, speaking to NY Times. “We applied on the spot.”

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French architecture firm Multipod Studio has come up with a revolutionary housing prototype – the PopUp House. This unique dwelling comes in the form of stackable blocks that anyone can put together IKEA style, using only a screwdriver. It’s supposedly as easy as building with Legos.

The company unveiled their PopUp House design in 2014, but was once again picked up by several media outlets last month, and since we missed the initial launch two years ago, we decided it was a good opportunity to include this amazing concept in our Architecture collection.

The PopUp House prototype, located in Aix-in-Provence, is a 1,614-square foot structure with an open layout – the living room is connected to a kitchen, dining area, and terrace. It also includes two bathrooms, an office, a master bedroom, and two smaller bedrooms. It doesn’t sound any different than a conventional house, but what really makes the PopUp House special is the construction process, which only takes four days and only requires an electric screwdriver.

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‘Barndominiums’ are becoming a major home improvement trend in North Texas, thanks to Morton Buildings, a construction company that specializes in converting ordinary barns into luxurious dwellings. They started in the year 2000, and they have since transformed thousands of barns and sheds across the US into beautiful mansions.

Paul and Judy Pogue, from McKinney, Texas, are the proud owners of two of the most amazing barndominiums made by Morton – one in their hometown and a 10-bedroom one in Oklahoma. The one in McKinney, a 6,600 square-foot steel structure, looks rather boring from the outside, but the inside is simply breathtaking. The old barn is finished with hard wood walls and floors, leather furnishings, chandeliers, a bar, kitchen, and all the other comforts of a luxury home.

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