View Now | Flintstones House
In the quiet upscale community of Hillsborough, California, a little south of San Francisco, sits the most unique home.
View Now | The Flintstones, 1966
Originally white, this home’s orange domes are easily seen from Hwy 280 and resemble the house from the animated primetime TV sitcom, The Flintstones where, where Fred, Wilma and Pebbles used to live. The Flintstones ran from 1960 through 1966. Based loosely on the 1950s show, The Honeymooners, the show follows two families, the Flintstone’s and the Rubbles, who live in Bedrock and have all the modern conveniences, except in prehistoric times.
Designed by William Nicholson and built in 1976, “The Flintstones House,” as its called, is an example of the experimental architecture movement of the 1970s. With rounded walls and domes, the Flintstone house was not easy to construct. The builder tried to form the domes by blowing up huge balloons, covering them with a wire mesh and then spraying gunnite or shotcrete onto them in a process called Monolithic Dome Construction. It was a complete failure until they added rebar to the structure to strengthen it.
While it sounds like a fun house to live in, the Hillsborough neighbors weren’t laughing. An ordinance was passed by the city council, after the home was completed, that banned all “experimental architecture” within the city limits. Hope came to the residents in the 1980s, when the property fell into disrepair and suffered major water damage from the hillside run-off. Their hopes were dashed, however, when a new owner purchased the property in 1987. Instead of tearing down the structure, it was repaired, remodeled and repainted its present orange color.
Now, the Flintstone home is for sale for only $2.4 million. This one-of-a-kind home has 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. It sits on an almost 2 acre lot and has 2,730 square feet of living space. Rumors still abound about this home. One has George Lucas as a previous owner. Another is that O.J. Simpson tried to buy it after his murder trial. Kinda makes you wonder who will own it next!
