Austin's Weird Homes Tour Returns!

Some houses are weirder than others.

Photo by Thanin Viriyaki

We don’t mean that maybe there’s a house where the stairs are to the left of the front door as you enter, as opposed to their being to the right of the front door as you enter.

We don’t mean that maybe there’s a little retro conversation pit in the middle of the otherwise dull living room and the candy dishes are from the Bakelite-loving 1920s.

We don’t mean that maybe the owners chose to paint some of the interior chartreuse and gold.

No, what we’re talking about is where there are so many odd configurations of architecture and/or arrangements of eclectic collections and/or painted or textured embellishments that the house you’re walking through might well be some alien museum of obsessive creativity, magically transplanted to Austin from the neighborhood of, say, Alpha Centauri or Fomalhaut or the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.

But it’s sad that there’s only one house like that in all of Austin, right?

Wrong.

Because there is an abundance of such houses in our area, citizen – and several of the best of them will be open for your viewing, with the owners welcoming you all congenially and perhaps even providing various refreshments and guided tours, from 10am to 6pm tomorrow.

That’s “tomorrow,” as in Saturday, April 22.

And it’s called The Weird Homes Tour, and – thanks to founders Chelle and David J. Neff – it’s been going strong since 2014.

We went on this Tour last year, and it was a day of wonderment to see these houses, to get to meet the people who maintain and live in them, to experience parts of town we’d only briefly passed through on the way to some party years before. To be out happily walking through the city in which we live – and not even in search of Pokémon to capture, imagine that.

And this year there are even more places on the tour.
And much of the money it takes in will benefit local charities.
And the weather on Saturday is supposed to be perfect for this sort of thing.

And, honestly, as distinctly local experiences go?
We can’t recommend this bright event (and its VIP-level afterparty) highly enough.