Rotating house goes up for sale in New Zealand

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/20/new-zealand-rotating-house-sale-auckland-maraeta-hillside-valuation-pictures

by manarth • 2 years ago

47 51 2 years ago

theguardian.com

pamelafox• 2 years ago

This would actually be very helpful for improving your lighting when webcamming in your home office, since you could rotate the house until you achieved optimal lighting for that time of day. Overkill, but that's how I'd use it!

swayvil• 2 years ago

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

yjftsjthsd-h• 2 years ago

Finally, the killer app for the Smart Home!:)

tompagenet2• 2 years ago

This Tom Scott video explains how a similar house works https://youtu.be/gisdyTBMNyQ?si=n7RoeCdOcP3MycSu

slillibri• 2 years ago

I wonder how it compares to the rotating house in San Diego?

https://rotatinghome.com

(Tom Scott video) https://youtu.be/gisdyTBMNyQ?si=31z_x0SHVH1_QAue

a1o• 2 years ago

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

ianburrell• 2 years ago

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.

asystole• 2 years ago

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

macspoofing• 2 years ago

Very cool. Also, I'm 100% sure this would be very expensive to maintain over the long term. You have custom motors that only a few mechanics would even touch, and who knows how this setup would hold up long-term against water, the elements and wear-and-tear.

If you can afford it, this is great.

ceejayoz5• 2 years ago

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.

bestnameever• 2 years ago

If you watch the Tom Scott video, the owner goes into the maintenance and why he was selling the property (IIRC).

bluGill2• 2 years ago

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).

shultays• 2 years ago

House of Theseus

bombcar3• 2 years ago

This really depends on what you mean by a "mansion". If you're up in the $20m house on $5m land, perhaps.

(My distinction is if a single family lives in it, it is NOT a mansion; it's not a mansion until it has support staff living in it, also.)

ahartmetz• 2 years ago

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.

OJFord• 2 years ago

A circular house with windows all the way around doesn't seem like one that particularly 'needs' to rotate?

ceejayoz5• 2 years ago

“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.

lostlogin• 2 years ago

I prefer this bit: “I was sitting there a few weeks ago and the sun came around and was in my TV, so I got up and turned the house.”

chankstein38• 2 years ago

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

dredmorbius2• 2 years ago

There are levels of laziness we all must aspire to:

<https://gcaptain.com/sailor-tells-the-best-laziest-person-st...>

9dev• 2 years ago

It took Dunick and his colleagues five years to design a system that ensured all the services such as water, electricity and sewage piping were independent and could rotate with the house as it moved – something the local council required before it would sign off on the build.

I'm curious what the actual system is -- I can't find additional information on it. Does anybody know?

dabluecaboose• 2 years ago

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

Tossrock• 2 years ago

A "slip ring" for fluid service is called a rotary union.

alargemoose• 2 years ago

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

luqtas• 2 years ago

we have a 11-story building that rotates each one independently here in Brazil [0]... according to the creator, spinning it uses the same energy as 3 light-bulbs ON at the same time

[0] https://g1.globo.com/pr/parana/noticia/2022/02/18/7-pergunta...

bombcar3• 2 years ago

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.

phh• 2 years ago

that being said, the ecological cost of manufacturing probably outweigh largely that power consumption at usage.

Dylan16807• 2 years ago

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

I don't see why they would. You can keep your gearing losses low as long as the first stage requires medium force.

If we oversimplify, if each stage loses ten percent of the incoming power while applying an 8:1 gear ratio, then you gain 7x more force every stage.

The situation where power disappears is when you add so many extra stages that the first stage requires almost no force and has to spin super fast to input work. So don't do that. Design the system so that the input is in the correct speed range for your power source.

wanderingstan• 2 years ago

Ran across this recently upon finding that time trial bicycles don’t really aim to be lightweight, only aerodynamic. When you’re cycling on flat ground, wind resistance is the greatest drag. (Pun intended.)

jader201• 2 years ago

If I'm going to get a rotating house, I'm not sure this would be the ideal view I'm going for:

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/fe6582afb531d97b94ee93237e504...

GrumpyNl• 2 years ago

Biggest turn down is the ceiling.

siriaan• 2 years ago

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.

djd20• 2 years ago

The sothebys advert had more pictures https://www.sothebysrealty.com/eng/sales/detail/180-l-281402...

mvdtnz• 2 years ago

Shame you'd have to live in Auckland.

crtified• 2 years ago

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.

fortran77• 2 years ago

If you rotate it fast enough, you can mount pictures to the outer wall without fasteners or adhesives!

ceejayoz5• 2 years ago

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

mattlondon• 2 years ago

Interesting that the whole thing rotates.

Ones I have seen that are similar have a rotating "donut" but a stationary core where 90% of the services (particularly water) are. I think the BT tower used this arrangement.

I guess that is cheating :)

mv4• 2 years ago

For those interested in the concept, there's a rotating house (aka Round House) in Wilton, Connecticut. I remember visiting it when it was for sale, it was pretty cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gXBqH46aww&ab_channel=Realt...

https://roundhousewilton.com/

kitd• 2 years ago

"... comes round for sale"?

orthecreedence• 2 years ago

Maybe I'm jaded because I live in what could be called a cabin in a forest and things are constantly breaking, but this just seems like an incredible layer of complexity that's begging for expensive repairs and constant maintenance.

Does anyone here know someone who knows someone who has actually been involved in one of these homes, and can you relay if it's actually as big of a pain in the ass as I'm thinking it is?

PH95VuimJjqBqy• 2 years ago

that was my reaction to it as well.

rufus_foreman• 2 years ago

If you built one that rotated near the speed of light would your neighbors age faster than you?

Rotating house goes up for sale in New Zealand

Related Stories