It’s Out There

Lately the hubs and I have been on something of a quest. For the last dozen years or so we’ve lived happily in a rapidly growing suburb of St. Louis. It’s been a great community for us with excellent schools for our sons, easy access to the city and its amenities, by which I mean baseball, and some of the best neighbors ever.

I’m really not in that much of a hurry. There are definitely some parts of moving that I’m not excited about. Image by jacqueline macou from Pixabay

But our youngest son is a senior in high school and almost a year ago, the hubs took a job that requires an hour long commute, so not too distantly in the future, it might be time for us to settle on a new home base.

We’ve been casually searching. Fortunately, we don’t have to be in a hurry, but I admit we’ve looked at quite a few properties and I’m starting to get a little frustrated. We’d like a bit more elbow room—space for a larger garden, a few fruit trees, and some chickens.

If we find a great plot of land and have to build a house, that would be okay, but ideally there’s a pretty little old farmhouse out there somewhere with a wood-burning fireplace and a good settin’ porch. Most importantly, though, it just has to feel right. Around every corner of windy country road, I hope that we’re going to spot this as-yet-unidentified perfect future home for us.

You just never know what might be waiting for you around the next bend in the road.

And it could happen, because you never know what a windy road will reveal. Last spring, on a family trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee, we rounded the corner of a windy road on Signal Mountain and discovered a UFO.

Actually, as much as it surprised me, I did have a pretty good idea what it was, because I had read about Futuro Houses, designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in 1968. These structures were prefabricated plastic homes constructed to resemble the Hollywood version of a flying saucer. Designed to be easily portable and to fit seamlessly into any terrain, the small houses contained a fireplace, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom, all behind a hatch door.

About one hundred of the UFO houses landed around the earth by the time the oil crisis of 1973 made the plastic structures cost-prohibitive to build. It also seems unlikely to me that there were ever more than a hundred people on Earth that might want to live in one.

A Futuro House just fitting in seamlessly with its surroundings. Henning Schlottmann (User:H-stt), CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

About sixty or so of the Futuros still exist around the world today, but I was surprised to discover that the flying saucer house on Signal Mountain just outside of Chattanooga isn’t one of them. Constructed in 1972, the Signal Mountain spaceship house certainly comes from the same cultural era as the Futuros, but with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a full bar, plenty of custom curved furniture, and around 2,000 square feet worth of floor plan, there’s a lot more space in this spaceship. And as it’s constructed of bizarre building materials like steel and concrete, it’s probably less likely to actually take flight.

Much like its plastic Finnish cousin, to say that the flying saucer house of Signal Mountain fits seamlessly into its environment might be a stretch. Perhaps it would be better if it had a nice settin’ porch, and were located on a pretty piece of land in Missouri. I’m convinced it’s out there.