Most unusual homes in the world

While most of us live in normal houses, there are some who either prefer or are forced by circumstances to live in unusual places.

Let's take a look at some of the most unusual houses in the world.

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Miguel Restrepo, 62, and wife Maria Garcia are seen from their sewer home in Medellin, Colombia. 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, TV, a chair and a bed, is a six square metre wide and 1.4 metres high tunnel that leaks when it rains, and requires a manhole cover.

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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.

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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, the Czech Republic. Lhota conceptualized the idea to create the unique house and started to build it in 1981, constructing it close to nature to benefit from the cooler ground temperature.

Lhota's house, which was completed in 2002, is able to move up and down and rotate on its sides, which allows him to adjust to his preferred window view.

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Brazilian artists Tiago Primo, top, and his brother Gabriel, bottom, hang out at a wall in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The bizarre vertical 'house' built on a climbing wall by artists has been drawing the attention of thousands who walk by the installation in Rio de Janeiro's downtown neighbourhood.

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The Heliodome, a bioclimatic solar house is seen in Cosswiller in the Alsacian countryside near Strasbourg, Eastern France. 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.

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Hong Kong architect Gary Chang rests in a hammock inside his 32-square-metre apartment in Hong Kong. After three decades in the same boxy dwelling 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'.

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An octagonal, three-bedroom, family home built on a rotating platform near Wingham, about 250km north east of Sydney. The house, which cost about $641,000 to build, can complete a full rotation in about 30 minutes according to it's owners.

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A woman stands inside the bathroom of a house, which was built upside down by Polish architects Irek Glowacki and Marek Rozhanski, in the western Austrian village of Terfens. The project is meant to serve as a new tourist attraction in the area, and is now open for public viewing.

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Tourists pose with an upside-down house in Tamparuli in Malaysia's state of Sabah on Borneo island. Built for tourist attraction, the traditional Sabah village house was built with everyday households items like computer, refrigerator, sofa sets, dining table and beds - but all items are upside down.

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A house partially built in the shape of an aeroplane in Abuja, Nigeria.

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Girls play on a trampoline near a home blasted from a rock wall at the Rockland Ranch community outside Moab, Utah, United States. The 'Rock', as it is referred to by about 100 people living there, was founded 35 years ago on a sandstone formation near Canyonlands National Park.

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Bohumil Lhota, a 73-year-old builder, stands in front of the house which he built in Velke Hamry, near the town of Jablonec nad Nisou, 100km north-east from Prague, the Czech Republic. Lhota conceptualized 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. Lhota's house, which was 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.

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Treehouses are seen on the Nine Ladies site in Stanton Lees, Derbyshire, northern England. The 32 acre site has been occupied for the past four years by the protestors, who are fighting to prevent the ancient quarry from being massively expanded to provide over three million tonnes of the much sought-after gritstone.

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A model sits in an bathtub inside a house constructed entirely of ice as part of a promotion for a German bank in Berlin. The house is made of some 1,000 ice blocks, with all interior appliances, furnishings and decoration encased within or made from ice.

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Thierry Atta sweeps the courtyard of his house built in the shape of a crocodile in Ivory Coast's capital Abidjan. Atta was an apprentice of the artist Moussa Kalo who designed and built the house but died two months ago.

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A Bulgarian woman looks inside her wine vat home in Socuellamos, central Spain. About 40 people living in this makeshift camp are ethnic Turks from Bulgaria who come 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.

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Potential buyers stand with an agent on the balcony of a three-bedroom home made from four old shipping containers in Sydney. Priced at around $100,000, the two-storey mobile home also includes two bathrooms, timber floors, air-conditioning, a kitchen, laundry, balcony and sewage treatment tank, which can be pulled apart in less than a day for ease of transportation.

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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. The upside-down house created by Daniel Czapiewski is supposed to describe the times of the former communist era and the present times in which we live.

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Benito Hernandez stands outside his home near San Jose de Las Piedras in Mexico's northern state of Coahuila. For over 30 years, Hernandez, his wife Santa Martha de la Cruz Villarreal and their family have lived in an odd sun-dried brick home with a huge 131 feet diameter rock used as a roof. The dwelling is found close to the town of San Jose de Piedras, a remote community located in the arid desert of Coahuila, some 80km from the border with Texas.

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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, Poland. A building just 36 inches wide as its narrowest point was opened in the Polish capital 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.

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Residents climb into their houses atop gravestones inside a cemetery in Manila, the Philippines. Many poor urban dwellers make their homes in public cemeteries, converting abandoned tombs and mausoleums into houses.

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A man walks past Huaiyuan Lou, one of the best protected Fujian Tulou built in the year 1909, in Nanjing county, Fujian province, China. 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.

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A view of a tree-house in Le Pian Medoc, southwestern France. France's Natura Cabana company rents various cabins perched in the trees for ecological holidays.

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A house built on a rock on the river Drina near the western Serbian town of Bajina Basta, about 160km from the capital Belgrade. 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.