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Want to commune with nature? Bring the outside in? Ditch your white-noise machine for a babbling brook going through your living room?
A home that went on the market last month in Arizona offers all this and more. Sidewinder Ranch is a 40-acre hillside property built over natural rock formations. Every room is of geological interest, with a TV shelf perched on rock and boulders creeping to the foot of the bed. A fountain built inside has the feel of a mountain stream, and the property has stunning desert views. “Buy 40 acres but it might as well be 400,” read the listing.
It amounts to a rugged, no-frills version of Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated Fallingwater. And the three-bedroom house is incredibly secluded, about a half-hour from the town of Willcox, population 3,200. For $225,000, you get the house, the property and a free bulldozer.
It does have some downsides, however: the current owner “regularly pulls rattlesnakes out” of the bathroom, according to the realtor, Clay Greathouse of Arizona Desert Rat Realty. A prospective new owner also got attacked by bees from a hive in the wall, Greathouse says. Apparently, that only added to its charms; Greathouse accepted an offer from the bee-stung buyer on Monday night.
The origins of Sidewinder Ranch are a mystery. “It looks like a mining shack or something, but there’s no traces of any mining that I see around there. So it just has me puzzled,” Greathouse says. The person who built it, he told the local NBC affiliate 12News, “had to have been some, I want to say, a hippie-dippie guy, got a lot of time on his hands”. Greathouse estimates the house was built in the 80s or 90s, though an abandoned nearby structure dates to the 1920s. The original owner stopped paying taxes for unclear reasons – perhaps death – and the house has exchanged hands a few times since.
The current owner doesn’t live there full time; instead, he treats it as a sort of “cabin” for getaways, says Greathouse. “It does take a certain adventurous spirit just to get up [the hill] to this place.” The treacherous ascent requires four-wheel drive.
The owner bonded with the new buyer over a shared love for motorcycles and, presumably, isolation. A creased book the realtor found in the building fell open to a “pretty appropriate” section on living in solitude.
Despite the rustic nature of the place, it is connected to the power grid. Its kitchen is “better than you’d expect”, according to the property blog Zillow Gone Wild. It boasts a septic system, a well and a bathroom with a shower and spa. Greathouse believes it has its own aquifer, making it immune to big agriculture’s water wars. Add a few solar panels and “it could definitely be a prepper place,” Greathouse says.
Still, the new owner has some work ahead of him to “make it livable”, he adds. “When the present owner bought it, one of the biggest tasks he had was chasing the pack rats out.”
Many other homes in Cochise county, Arizona, are unusual, and that’s no coincidence. A legal provision in the county eases the permitting process, aiming to “encourage the use of ingenuity” and facilitate “the use of alternative building materials and methods”. Homes in the county are made using geodesic domes, rammed earth and straw bales. “It’s kind of a freedom-loving, do-as-you-want sort of place,” Greathouse says.
Further afield, the American west hosts plenty of other architectural oddities. Three years ago, a house fit for the Jetsons – essentially a giant disc on a pole – hit the market in Tulsa, Oklahoma. California’s Bay Area is home to what’s known as the Flintstones house, a cartoonish, dinosaur-filled property that has long delighted onlookers (the occasional legal complaint notwithstanding). Sidewinder Ranch, on the other hand, is for those chasing the real Flintstonian dream of living directly on bedrock.
