For sale: Volcano House - $750,000

The perfect lair from which to hatch your evil plans for global domination.

While many a volcano has flared up lately with maddening consequences, the cinder cone that hosts the “Volcano House” in Newberry Springs, Calif., offers nothing but cosmic, barren beauty. The creation of architect Harold J. Bissner Jr., the dome house has been sitting atop a 150-foot conical hill of volcanic fragments since 1968 and is now for sale, at $750,000. The 1,800-square-foot home—guarded by two caretakers whose faces have been sculpted by desertic whim—and its adjoining 60 acres belong to Huell Howser, the host of California’s Gold, the travel show for PBS affiliate KCET that highlights places of interest in California, often along remote paths. Howser became so popular that Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, featured a “Howserian” character named Howell Huser in two episodes. Somehow HH also ended up on a bottle of Broguiere’s milk.

For Sale: Volcano House: The California classic has midcentury beauty, rich history (Via Tinselman)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Karloskar

Welcome to my secret lair on Skullcrusher Mountain…
- Andrew Reid
  
  Beat me to it.
  
  Seriously, has this thing been in any movies? It looks weirdly familiar.
  - retepslluerb
    
    Looks a little bit like like the lair in Diamonds are forever.
    (It isn’t though – but gives a similar vibe).
penguinchris

I was curious so I found it on google maps and also found an article with some interior photos, which look quite cool. Most of the articles about this are from 2010 so I wonder if it’s actually been sold by now. It’s undeniably cool but the location does suck – it’s definitely a desert retreat for someone wealthy from LA or LV and not someplace you’d want to live full time.
- http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
  
  Hmmmm. That looks like bat country.
  - awjt
    
    Right in the middle of snakeville, which is not too far from cougartown, and I don’t mean sexy middle aged ladies.
    - http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
      
      It’s also near Barstow, on the edge of the desert, where the drugs began to take hold.
- Anon_Mahna
  
  If I had the moola to buy it, I’d live there full time.. Might just ward off the Jehovah’s Witnesses that bug me every other weekend
TerranceS

Huell donated this house to Chapman a few months ago. I don’t believe it is on the market:
http://www.thepantheronline.com/news/huell-howser-donates-volcano-house-to-chapman-1.2869451
- The Tim
  
  Indeed, it was listed for sale on the market in September 2009, but was de-listed early last month. It was for sale when the original linked article was published in April, but is no longer, due to the donation mentioned by TerranceS.
petsounds

Wait, so is this an actual inactive volcano, or did they just truck out hunks of basalt into a hill shape?
- penguinchris
  
  The terminology is arguable but yes this is an actual inactive volcano. It looks like it’s part of a larger lava field from a much larger volcano’s lava flow. Smaller ones like this pop up sort of like pimples. I’ve attached an excerpt from this geologic map (WARNING 16MB PDF), the volcano the house is on is the small circle of pink to the right of where it says Troy Lake (which may be the small lake that’s next to the volcano). The pink rocks, labeled Tv, are Tertiary era volcanics.
  - petsounds
    
    Interesting. I didn’t know there were mini-volcanoes such as this, and didn’t realize there were any lava flows in California recent enough to have exposed volcanic rock. The mountain range on the Grapevine is obviously made from lava flows (you can tell from the pixels), but those must be millions of years old. This thing seems much more recent.
    - penguinchris
      
      Well… they’re Tertiary which stretches from 2.6 to 65.5 million years ago, so these are millions of years old too :) Here’s the standard geological time scale if you’re interested.
      
      I am a geologist, and I went to grad school in SoCal and have been out to look at stuff in this area, but I’m not particularly familiar with it and there isn’t more detailed info on the map. So I’m not sure if the lava flow been more accurately dated than that, but it probably has been. The focus of that map is on the recent stuff (Quaternary deposits) so leaves out the details of the older stuff.
      
      Anyway, mini volcanoes like this are not particularly common, but there are a few places in the US where you can see them. Anywhere with a major lava flow independent of mountain-building events will have them (you see lava and stuff elsewhere in California that is related to the processes that created the Sierras etc.) Another notable one is at the Snake River Plain in Idaho and there are a whole bunch of small volcanoes like this that you can see from the highway as you drive through.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Amboy Crater is right on Route 66. It’s an easy climb.
    - kennyboy019
      
      Lots of lava up here in Northern California (As in 200+ miles north of Sacramento). We even have a National Monument dedicated to them called Lava Beds National Monument.
      I’ve been camping near there a couple of times at a place called Medicine Lake just to the south east of there. Its a giant caldera that you wouldn’t see if you didn’t know it was there.
Carlos Watson

I see a sequel coming…
Paul Renault

It’s too far from the sea. No good for a lair.
- Anon_Mahna
  
  Melt the polar caps. You’re an evil overlord think about the big pictures :D
  - Paul Renault
    
    Nope, it wouldn’t work:
    The altitude of Newberry Springs is approximately 3,000 ft (910 m) above sea level, according to Wikipedia.
    
    Most of the ice at the caps is floating ice, so melting that ice would have zero effect. Melting the Greenland ice and the ice on land in Antartica would, at the very most, raise the sea level by thirty feet.
    
    Anyways, the last place you want your lair to be is in the ‘high-res’ satellite image areas of Google Earth.
http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza

I suggested to Heather that we move there. She took a look at it and said,”I do not wish to live in a tit.”
- Paul Renault
  
  I could make a joke along to lines of “But, but, you LIVE with a tit”, but I won’t.
Reuben Rivas

cnn youtube video of both int/ext shots of this volcano house…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXAK-khIfkI
http://twitter.com/davesgeekyideas Dave Delisle

I lava it. Where do I sign?
- aarontheman
  
  Easy there, you’re already burning through your finances. (One bad pun deserves an even worse one.)
http://deansli.st/ Dean Putney

It’s Mojo Jojo’s lair!
awjt

Too bad it doesn’t have a “magma chamber.”