Western homes | Offbeat Home

This is Offbeat Home's archive of Western homes posts.

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Every once in a while, I tiptoe through AirBNB to see what kind of cool houses I could book on it. Here's the latest find!

This Los Angeles AirBNB listing centers on the $150,000 pool/spa set up your room overlooks. If you rent here, it's like booking a stay on The Real World — but you got the best room in the house without fighting your castmates!

Pool, spa, beach, slide, grotto, and dive-in movie screen. If you look closely, you can see the little green zip line handle to the upper-left of the pool basketball court. This picture was taken before we installed the second 14-foot theater screen.

I own and rent out rooms in an AMAZING HOUSE in a good, clean, quiet neighborhood south of South Pasadena, just 7 minutes from downtown Los Angeles, in the city of Alhambra. It's a huge 5 bedroom/2.5 bath 2800 square foot house, and there are 4 housemates with longer-term leases who live here with me. I do a lot fo traveling, so I rent out my room as well when I am gone.

Come in!

I've been curating my household of oddities, antiques, and collectibles — largely from my job at an auction house in San Francisco, and also fed by my love of local sales and thrifting. I think my finds add a charm to my home that was otherwise missing.

This is my house, where I keep all my Things and make my art.

"Our space is great. There aren't really many challenges with the structure of it." Says the girl who built a bed in a closet. That's just the first reason you'll love this home tour.

My friend Rachel spends a lot of time fantasizing about houses. And stalking houses. She sent me this week's Offbeat Real Estate dreamboat: an "artistic" house in Idaho, now up for sale or trade. It's off the grid, a 1/2 mile from the road, and three floors on 12 acres — with the middle floor set up as a tile cutting/stained glass studio, it's perfect for someone who needs to get away and work for a while.

Imagining yourself in this home takes some work — the owner has a love of using flash and therefore, taking really unappealing photos. It's okay. I'll help you fantasize.

It was 1975 and my parents' "back to the land" impulses were in full swing. Although they had an infant (me) and were a geography professor and a nursing student (him, her) with no experience in construction or building (any of us), they decided to build a log cabin on Bainbridge Island, WA. My father, ever the researcher, read a bunch of books about the subject, and March of 1976 they broke ground on the 1000 square foot cabin I grew up in.

In 2011, I temporarily moved back in.

Hardwood factory floors, hugely-high ceilings and 18-foot windows set the stage for Dee and Nathan's home/pop-up vintage shop. Come in a take a tour of their loft, covet their art and scope Dee's lunchbox collection/filing system.

Six months of living in an industrial loft in 1999 soured me so deeply on everything urban, I fled the city completely and moved an hour south of Seattle to Olympia, WA. This is in commemoration of the amazing house we rented.

Sarah and Tyler built a teeny tiny straw bale cabin — only 450 square feet. By working with intent in mind, the space looks big, airy, and very utilitarian. What can we learn from their kitchen's vertical planning?