Casa Neverlandia

This is a one storey house from 1906 that its owner has spent decades building upward and covering in mosaic. The artist James Edward Talbot turned it into a three storey structure faced in stone and broken tile, and he has set into that facade stones from an Austin building he once worked on, from houses he lived in in Turkey and Paraguay, and from his mother's birthplace, so the outside wall is partly an autobiography. Talbot grew up in a military family that moved constantly. He finished four years of architecture school, handed the diploma to his parents, and went about doing the opposite of what it qualified him for, including a period living in a treehouse in Honduras and a business designing playscapes. The inside of the house follows from that: a Rumford fireplace, a music room lined with vinyl records, a two storey A frame room in an Indonesian style trimmed in bamboo and used for ping pong, and a lookout tower over the city reached by a rope bridge. It is a private home in the Bouldin Creek neighbourhood, not a museum, and tours run by appointment rather than on a schedule. Folk art environments of this kind, built by one person over a working lifetime with no client and no plan, are rare anywhere and rarer still on a street this close to a downtown.