‘Cowboy Boot House’ in Texas rents for $1,200 a month

If the shoe fits, live in it?

By Barbara Eldredge@barbaraeldredge Apr 12, 2017, 10:30am EDT

On the spectrum of totally bizarre U.S. homes, Huntsville, Texas’s Cowboy Boot House falls somewhere between whimsically cute and completely bonkers. The shoe-shaped house is 711 square feet, including the more conventionally shaped annex off the back. It’s got two extremely odd bedrooms featuring materials as diverse as marble tile, raw wood shelves, mis-matched shiplap, and a ceiling paneled with album covers.

Corrugated metal siding lines the interior of the kitchen and double-height bootleg. A bright red spiral staircase leads up to a roof deck at the neck of the boot. The home is being rented out for $1,200 a month.

Unlike most novelty buildings, which seem to have peaked in the U.S. in the 1920s, the Cowboy Boot House was finished just in January. It was designed and built by local artist Dan Phillips, whose organization, Phoenix Commotion, uses recycled materials and apprentice labor to construct and renovate creative abodes—like this bone-themed house and a reno inspired by the Budweiser beer can.

While Huntsville’s enormous boot won’t become one of a pair, Phillips is already working on a cowboy-hat-shaped building for the lot next door.