Sutyagin House

Sutyagin House

Claimed to be the world's tallest single-family wooden structure house... or better put, one of the most amazing looking structures ever built
Why build it? According to him 'Because he can'... or at least could.
The Sutyagin house was a wooden house in Arkhangelsk, Russia. The 13-story, 144-ft tall residence of a local entrepreneur Nikolai Petrovich Sutyagin was reported to be the world's tallest wooden house.
Sutyagin began building in 1992 and in the original plans it was only going to reach two stories high, a normal house. However, convinced by a trip to see wooden houses in Japan and Norway, he decided that he had not used the roof space efficiently enough and kept building.
"First I added three floors but then the house looked ungainly, like a mushroom," he said. "So I added another and it still didn't look right so I kept going. What you see today is a happy accident."
Constructed by Mr. Sutyagin and his family over 15 years, without formal plans or a building permit, the structure deteriorated while Mr. Sutyagin spent a few years in prison on racketeering charges.
Sadly in 2008, the house was condemned as a fire hazard, and ordered to be destroyed. (Most of the town is built of wood and the concern was that it would catch on fire, fall over, and then cause the entire town to burn.) Beginning with the tower, most of the house pulled down and reduced to a pile of wooden fragments.
What remains (at least as of late 2009) is a small two story wooden house, roughly the size of what Mr. Sutyagin had originally planned to build, before dreams of a wooden tower took hold.

Read more about Sutyagin House on Atlas Obscura...