Rotating house goes up for sale in New Zealand

This website has so few pictures for something so cool! The video is great.

I find it interesting that both houses were designed by engineers to live in. I wonder how similar their solutions for utilties are. Both are being sold when the builders have gotten too old.

My main question is how easy are they to maintain, or do they require the experience of the engineer builders. It is a good sign that they have been going for decades.

There might be a market for selling designs and parts to people who want to build their own.

The way the water/gas etc come in through a custom-designed assembly is so cool. Blew my mind.

Biggest turn down is the ceiling.

Those houses across the street are reminiscent of the sort of mid-century build you'd see lining the streets of every city and town where a young New Zealander might have grown up. So you get views of the three things your average Kiwi idolises - the sea, the bush, and the suburb.

If the house could track your location (motion, ir) the house could rotate so the sun/moon was always looking at you through the window.

For what that's worth

> “The advantage is that you can change the view, you can change the sun, you can get out of the wind or into the wind … If there is a storm coming at night [and] you don’t want that on your bedroom windows, you turn it,” he told the Guardian on Tuesday.

I'm going to be honest, if it takes 33 minutes to rotate all the way around, I don't see the utility in this at all. "Oh no the sun is in my eyes in the living room, let me rotate away from it!" 15 minutes later sun is back in your eyes. I'm with you too, I think of it like the sleep number beds. It's really cool but I'm going to end up finding a specific setting I like and the functionality that makes it expensive is going to be nullified bc I'll never move it again lol

The amount of energy to rotate (or move something on a flat plane) is surprisingly low.

This is how you can have a human pull a 747 or a pickup truck pull a plane.

There's some technicality of "with enough gearing anything can move anything" but at some point the losses involved overcome the power provided.

Unsure about this particular house in NZ, but there's one in California that Tom Scott did a video on with a very good animation of how its electricity/water/sewage slip ring works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gisdyTBMNyQ

It’s not the same rotating house, but Tom Scott did a video last year that has a great 3D render of the system that designer used to facilitate their build!

https://youtu.be/gisdyTBMNyQ?si=qA3jyigfe4SMzDNn

that was my reaction to it as well.

> who knows how this setup would hold up long-term against water, the elements and wear-and-tear

Thirty five years so far. I'd presume you'd get an inspection before purchasing, but if it's mechanically all good after that time period, it sounds pretty sustainable.

Will they keep it at all? This is not a mansion ($600k in USD), but the other features make me suspect it will be sold as a mansion not a house. A house is sold, but mansions are not sold, they just go with the lot (view), with the understanding the new owner will knock down the house to build the house they want there. Sometimes they will leave one wall standing so it qualifies as a remodel, but the next year there will be another remodel to replace that wall (depending on local laws).

The final drive and the bearing(!) would be the most custom parts, most likely. The rest could be off-the-shelf industrial parts, which can last a very long time.

Rapid disposal of unwanted guests as a bonus; just shuffle them to an open window.

Not that the following necessarily negates HN's dislike for such one-liners, but here's a little context on the above comment, for people outside NZ:

The single city of Auckland, which is located at the northern end of New Zealand's 1600km long landmass, holds about one-third of the country's total population.

By contrast, for example, the entire South Island of New Zealand - which is about 60% of the country's landmass - holds about 23% of the country's population.

The somewhat extreme geographical population spread means that there is a constant undercurrent of "Auckland, and The Rest" in NZ culture. It is this to which the above poster attempts to make humorous reference.