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STACK ROCK FORT SITS ON a rocky island about 800 yards off the western coast of Wales near Milford Haven. Built between 1850 and 1852 and later upgraded, it has been under private ownership but effectively abandoned for almost a century. Recently sold, this imposing two-in-one fort is now awaiting a new lease of life. The original idea for a fort on Stack Rock actually goes back to Thomas Cromwell and 1539. The English lawyer, statesman and chief minister to King Henry VIII proposed the fortification of the island to protect the Milford Haven Waterway (a natural harbor), but nothing ever came of the plan. Similar proposals and surveys of the island followed in 1748 and 1817, but it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that any plan came to fruition.

Spaces

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In 1855, a cluster of cave dwellings like this one were made in Langenstein, a village of around 2,000 inhabitants in Halberstadt, near Germany’s Harz Mountains. Five of the 10 caves have been carefully preserved and are now open to visitors. Scholle, a member of the Langensteiner Höhlenwohnungen association, offers regular tours of these curious quarters. These aren’t the first such cave homes in the region, he notes, pointing to a mountaintop in the near distance where the castle of Langenstein—the Altenburg—once stood. “There were natural caves there that people lived in from around 1787 until 1916, with postal addresses and everything,” he says. “Those were our first inhabited caves.” One of the Altenburg caves, too, has been preserved and is open to the public.

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The home is elevated and built around the surrounding pine forest. It’s only accessible by one bright red staircase, which functioned as a drawbridge and could be lifted to cut off the outside world. It’s sometimes referred to as the “repeatable house” or the “un-finishable house,” since it was completely modular and could be expanded on at any time. These days, the home is a showcase of graffiti and local flora, although it’s been rumored that the home may be turned into an event space sometime soon.

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