California: home to Hollywood stars, freethinking creatives and progressive laws — there shouldn’t be any Barney Rubble with a house shaped like The Flintstones’, right?
Not so, apparently, between San Jose and San Francisco, with the town of Hillsborough filing a lawsuit against local landmark the "Flintstone House" off the Interstate 280 highway.
Owner Florence Fang has fully embraced the vibrant orange and purple hillside property, prominent from the Doran Memorial Bridge, since snapping it up in 2017, surrounding the bulbous buildings with dinosaurs and a "Yabba Dabba Do" sign.
But the town reckons it’s a public nuisance and alleges Fang is long overdue addressing municipal code violations and must remove “landscaping improvements” done without planning approvals or permits, according to The Daily Journal.
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The quirky pad reportedly languished on the market for two years before Fang snapped it up for US$2.8 million.
Inside the architectural oddity. Photo / Alain Pinel Realtors
Atlas Obscura notes the house “playfully dubbed by Bay Area residents as The Flintstone House, is actually an experimental house built in 1976 with rooms in which every surface is rounded".
“Beneath its burnt orange (originally white) coat of paint is a slew of cement, rebar, plaster putty, wire mesh, and aeronautical balloons.”
This building technique, known as monolithic dome construction, was invented in Idaho in 1975 and Bay Area architect William Nicholson built a series of structures using this method, including the Flintstone House the following year.
It’s rumoured George Lucas once owned the house and that O.J. Simpson made a bid on it following his infamous 1995 trial, according to Atlas Obscura.
The domed digs include three bedrooms, one accessed via a spiral staircase inspired by an ice cream cone, two bathrooms and a two-car garage.
But despite the municipality’s distaste, the house seems to have more fans than not, with Fang, whose family once owned several newspapers in the US, telling Mercury News she received about 20 cards from strangers thanking her for saving the house after her purchase.
“People even send me candy,” she told the paper.
“One card, I opened it and a dinosaur popped out.”
- news.com.au
