The Bloomhouse by Lodgewell | Fairy Tale Escape

One-of-a-kind-of-unbelievable.
West Austin | Fairy Tale Escape | Nightly Rental | 1100 Sq. Ft. | Sleeps 4

Ever stay in a giant seashell unicorn? No, you haven't, but now you can cross it off your bucket list. This magical work of art is part Willy Wonka, part Big Lebowski, and totally unlike anywhere else. Do it for the 'gram, but also for your soul.

Come take a vacation from the real world of right angles and ticky tacky boxes. Situated on a secluded lot and wonderfully restored, The Bloomhouse is a celebration of all things magical and mystical.

How the heck did this magnificent beast come to be? Like all the best things in Austin, it started with some hippies and a dream. See, back in the 70s, while Wooderson was wasting all his time away, two UT architecture students decided to build an escape from society that would become a monument to man and nature. Their goal was a home that would not only protect you from the elements but allow you to live in harmony with the environment. They wanted this quixotic vision to provide a place of peace and isolation, a place so far removed that for many years there was no physical address.

Then the hippie dream disappeared into the 1980's Austin real estate boom, and there in the hills, the Bloomhouse waited. It would need just the right person who could see the home's potential to bring this work of art back from the brink. And then the home's fortunes shifted on a chance event. In 2017, Dave Claunch saw a real estate ad fall out of an Austin Business Journal for the Bloomhouse – a local legend he had learned about during his time as mayor. Claunch knew he had to save and preserve this one-of-a-kind place. Since buying the home, Claunch has spent over a year meticulously restoring the home with period-specific details to take it back to its original form.

When you drive away from the shores of Lake Austin through West Lake Hills on your way to the Bloomhouse, you don't know exactly where you're headed, but you know it's up. Up, up, up, and up the high road (Bloomhouse is literally located off of High Road). With unbelievable views of downtown Austin receding in your rearview, you find the side street where the house awaits in a wooded valley. Traveling along the road, you see her—the fantastical beast in the clearing—and you laugh out loud at the ridiculousness, the joy, the sheer courage of a house built to bend the rules of what's possible. Is it a white wolf in the clearing? A merengue sculpture? A mirage? You appear to have entered another planet's architectural heritage, and you've arrived exactly where you're supposed to be.

When you stay at the Bloomhouse, you are entering a place where magic can and will happen. Without one straight line or corner in the entire structure*, your thoughts are free of the constraints that our angular world creates. At the Bloomhouse, you leave behind the confines of modernity and the rules of logic, to live only in whimsy. We are alive in a fairytale of our own making. Let the story begin.

*Ok ok, the sliding back doors are technically rectangles, but you catch our drift. ;-)

The Bloomhouse cannot accommodate children under the age of 5.