"There's just something inviting about being able to rub up against nature in your living room," says John Carson in a New York Times piece by Joyce Wadler (11/19/09). For John, and his wife Sharon Slowik, that means rubbing up against "a 250-ton bluestone ... 8 feet high, 15 feet wide, 22 feet deep." Building a house around a rock -- a really, really big rock -- had been John's dream since he was about seven years old.

His inspiration came while trekking with his father through Pennsylvania's Allegheny Mountains, looking for a Christmas tree. They happened upon an old barn that had collapsed over a cliff, and John says he told his father that one day he was "gonna build a house and the fourth wall is gonna be a rock." He says he spent about the next 40 years looking for the right rock and checked out some 75 properties before finding it in Margaretville, N.Y.

Making his idea work meant waterproofing the rock, building a foundation that consumed half of its height and installing radiant-heat tubing so that the rock maintains "a temperature of 68 degrees throughout the winter." The other complication is that the property is not flat, so John had to build it on two levels with separate foundations. But John and Sharon seem happy with the result; their rock not only "dominates the living room" but also provides a "ledge that juts out on one side, forming a seat in front of the fireplace, allowing the rock to become part of the conversation."