Wednesday, July 09, 2008


Extreme Homes on New HGTV Series

Dwellings that float, spin, perch precariously and defy gravity is are the focus of HGTV's newest series, Extreme Living. Featured will be the house built entirely from 747 jumbo jet parts and plans for the "fab tree-hab" made entirely out of living, growing trees.

Each week, Extreme Living will show two different wildly high-concept, boldly designed and luxurious homes and introduce those who live there. The series also creates visual 3-D animations to highlight the stories behind these engineering marvels and architectural feats and their creation from conception to construction.

The show also interviews the teams of architects, engineers and builders who have helped create these extreme dream homes for the homeowners who were looking for unique dwellings. The series spotlights the most unusual parts of the construction process, ingenious innovations and special techniques devised to overcome obstacles facing particular sites - related to space, location, zoning, climate, natural phenomena, and more.

In the launch episode, Extreme Living travels to just outside of San Francisco to meet a young family who built a "bridge" house on property that spans a deep ravine with a creek below in an earthquake zone. In addition, viewers will be taken to downtown Santa Barbara where they will experience one of the world's smallest and tallest homes - a multi-tiered Moroccan-style masterpiece narrowly built with just one room per floor.

Some of the other amazing homes featured in the series include:

- The "boulder shiskebab" is a gorgeous hillside North Carolina vacation home that teeters 60 feet in the air on a stack of boulders and hangs on the edge of a cliff, with hair-raising balconies.
- The "recycled trash" house is an unbelievable home constructed entirely out of recycled garbage, located off the grids in the deserts of New Mexico.
- The " round rotating house" in CT is one of the world's most amazing spinning homes.
- The "jumbo jet" is a first-class home being built by using the plane parts from a 747 aircraft.
- The "monster refrigerator" home in Venice Beach, CA is a stunning seaside home to chill out in! Wrapped entirely in refrigerator panels, it is literally the coolest house on the block and has some amazing design features.
- The "wave house," situated in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, is a wondrous abode made of wavy lines, circles and cylinders to mimic nature and enhance sound.
- The "floating house" is a California hillside home in an earthquake zone that floats precariously on stilts above the hill beneath it.
- The "container house," located in Maine is a delightful vacation home constructed from 12 steel shipping containers welded together.
- The "billboard house" is an impossibly thin triangle home that is San Diego's residential version of New York's famous Flat Iron building--complete with a window that lowers down and converts into an instant drawbridge deck.
- The "fab tree-hab" is where botany meets technology in an extreme green home that is 100 percent organic and ecological. On the design drawing board now, it is made entirely of living, breathing trees and could be the housing craze of the future.
- The "subterranean home" is a Texas treasure built entirely underground to protect against the elements.
- The "swamp house" on a secluded barrier island off the coast of South Carolina is a marshland home raised 20 feet in the air, above the annual floodwaters.

Extreme Living premieres Thursday, July 10 at 9:30 pm ET/PT on HGTV