PICTURES

Unusual homes from around the world

Treehouses are seen on the Nine Ladies site in Stanton Lees, Derbyshire, northern England on Mar 25, 2004. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
Treehouses are seen on the Nine Ladies site in Stanton Lees, Derbyshire, northern England on Mar 25, 2004. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
Palestinian Halimeh Saleem (left) washes dishes at her cave home in the northern Negev Desert, near the West Bank city of Hebron on Jan 17, 2007. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
A view of about 70 domes houses, which were built by US based Domes for the World, for villagers who lost their houses to an earthquake in Sumberharjo village, near Indonesia's ancient city of Yogyakarta on May 8, 2007. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
A Bulgarian woman looks inside her wine vat home in Socuellamos, central Spain on Oct 2, 2007. About 40 people living in this makeshift camp are ethnic Turks from Bulgaria who came to the vineyards of Socuellamos to pick grapes during the six-week annual harvest. At night, they sleep in 20 or so overturned wine vats, car-sized concrete barrels dumped on the outskirts of Socuellamos, a farming community in the hot and dusty region of Castilla-La Mancha. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
People wait in line to visit an upside-down house built at the Centre of Education and Promotion of the Region in the village of Szymbark, northern Poland on July 31, 2007. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
Mr Kong Siu-kau waits for dinner in a small cage in Hong Kong's Tai Kok Tsui district on July 16, 2008. In older districts like Tai Kok Tsui, hundreds of elderly men still reside in caged cubicles in cramped, old tenement flats which house up to 12 individuals in often squalid conditions.  -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
Residents climb into their houses atop gravestones inside a cemetery in Manila on Oct 21, 2008. Many poor urban dwellers make their homes in public cemeteries, converting abandoned tombs and mausoleums into houses. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS 
Young sea gypsies play in the water in the center of their neighborhood in the Sulawesi Sea in Malaysia's state of Sabah on the Borneo island on Feb 17, 2009. A community of 30 families of the indigenous ethnic group of sea gypsies are still maintaining a nomadic and sea-based life without fresh water supply, TV nor electricity, and only go to land to bury the dead. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
A house partially built in the shape of an airplane is seen in Abuja on Nov 24, 2009. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
Hong Kong architect Gary Chang rests in a hammock inside his 32 sq m apartment in Hong Kong on Jan 28, 2010. After three decades in the same boxy dwelling Mr Chang grew up in, he has come up with an innovative answer to the increasingly cramped lives of many urban dwellers, the science fiction-like domestic transformer. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
A man sits as he smokes at the door of his cave-room in Yuncheng, Shanxi province, China on Aug 7, 2010. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
Mr Bohumil Lhota, a 73-year-old builder, turns the house he built in Velke Hamry, near the town of Jablonec nad Nisou, 100km north-east from Prague, Czech Republic on Aug 7, 2012. Mr Lhota conceptualised the idea to create the unique house and started to build it in 1981, building it close to nature to benefit from the cooler ground temperature. Mr Lhota's house, which is built in 2002, is able to move up and down and rotate on its sides, which allows him to adjust to his preferred window view. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS 
  A man takes a picture of the one of the world's narrowest buildings, built as an artistic installation wedged between two existing buildings, in Warsaw on Oct 23, 2012. A building just 92cm wide as its narrowest point was opened in Warsaw on Oct 20, 2012, as an artistic installation that will be a home from home for Israeli writer Edgar Keret. Keret, who told news channel TVN24 he would live there when he visits Warsaw twice a year, said he conceived the project as a kind of memorial to his parents' family who died in the World War Two Holocaust. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS 
Girls play on a trampoline near a home blasted from a rock wall at the Rockland Ranch community outside Moab, Utah on Nov 2, 2012. The "Rock" as it is referred to by the approximately 100 people living there in about 15 families, was founded about 35 years ago on a sandstone formation near Canyonlands National Park. Polygamy was a part of the teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was brought to Utah by faithful Mormons in the late 1840s. The mainstream Mormon church abandoned the practice in 1890, but an estimated 37,000 Mormon fundamentalists continue the practice today and believe plural marriage brings exaltation in heaven. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
Visitors walk inside a nearly 700-year-old Fujian Tulou in Nanjing county, Fujian province, China on Nov 19, 2012. The earthen Tulou buildings, which set up enclosed walls to defend against outside dangers, have served the Hakka people since 11th century, when their ancestors settled down at the south west of Fujian province to escape from rule of Jin ethnic. In 2008, 46 Fujian Tulou were written into the list of World Heritage by United Nations educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation for not only its outstanding historical and cultural value, but also its excellence in size and building techniques. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
Mr Miguel Restrepo (left), 62, and wife Maria Garcia are seen from their sewer home in Medellin Dec 4, 2012. The former drug addict has been living in an abandoned sewer with his wife and dog Blackie for 22 years. Their home, which is fitted with a kitchen, a fan, television, a chair and a bed, is a 6 sq m wide and 1.4m high tunnel that leaks when it rains, and requires a manhole cover. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS 
A child stands at the door of a shipping container serving as his accommodation, in Shanghai on Mar 4, 2013. The containers, which house different families, were set up by the landlord, who charges a rent of 500 yuan (S$103) per month for each container. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
A man powers a boat near a house built on a rock on the river Drina near the western Serbian town of Bajina Basta, about 160km from the capital Belgrade on May 22, 2013. The house was built in 1968 by a group of young men who decided that the rock on the river was an ideal place for a tiny shelter, according to the house's co-owner, who was among those involved in its construction. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
A privately built villa, surrounded by imitation rocks, is pictured on the rooftop of a 26-storey residential block in Beijing on Aug 13, 2013. A resident in the building has spent more than six years to build a villa covering over 1,000 sq m, on top of a 26-storey building in Beijing, according to local media. Residents in the building complained about the villa, fearing its weight may cause structural collapse. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
The Heliodome, a bioclimatic solar house is seen in Cosswiller in the Alsacian countryside near Strasbourg, eastern France on Aug 4, 2011. The house is designed as a giant three-dimensional sundial, set on a fixed angle in relationship to the sun's movements to provide shade during the summer months, keeping the inside temperature cool, and during Fall, Winter and Spring, sunlight enters the large windows as the sun's position is lower in the sky, thus warming the living space. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS

(REUTERS) - Home is where the heart is, no matter what unusual form that home may take.

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