OMG!!! Obsession Made Manifest

The House that Rocks

The House on the Rock, as most of these things do, started out as a private project. Alex Jordan and his family regularly used to visit the spot for picnics and eventually the desire to build a home (and the wherewithal to purchase the land) materialised and so Alex launched into the building of the house.

Partly hewn from the rock and with bizarrely low ceilings and a Asian theme, the house itself is quite weird…

… and that’s before adding features like the Infinity Room - jutting out into space over the valley …

Very cool, but sadly you can't go right to the end

But what really sets it apart, and the reason why it had to be developed into a vast complex, was Alex’s obsession with collecting. There are themes within the collection, but this does not seem the work of an entirely sane mind! The scale is such that I presume he must have staffed it out at some point. If not, kudos to the power of both obsession and the ability to execute, but it seems like more than one lifetime’s work!

So there are sections to the house, but even within those, items are randomly scattered - so in a section on distilling, there will be a few randomly scattered gatling guns. Although who knows, maybe back in the prohibition days…

First section - the Streets of Yesteryear - a street of old fashioned shops as a vehicle for displaying come of the collected oddities, some of them quite disturbing! The whole place is quite dark and I begin to wonder whether I will ever sleep again after seeing some of this stuff.

I'm not sure what is going on with the man and the pig, but he seems to be enjoying himself

Possibly my favourite section is the Heritage of the Sea. I’m not too fussed about the many model ships, but there is huge 3 storey construction of a whale being attacked by a giant octopus. I’m quite taken with that although, irritatingly, it is so big that it is pretty much impossible to get a vantage point to take a photograph of the whole thing.

And then there is this

Ringo would be so proud. Then again. Ringo would probably demand royalties for this.

Then there is a section near the restaurant (I don’t know whether this was another of the oddities he collected, but the woman working in the restaurant is the surliest person I have ever met in the US!) which seems to be fairly themeless - maybe general Americana, maybe just stuff that wouldn’t fit elsewhere. I like the Burma Shave adverts though.

Next on to a huge (not just in the number but also the scale of individual exhibits) collection of musical automata

And eventually on to the main event - the carousel. This is the world’s largest carousel (in fact there are several world’s largest here - clock and pipe organ too), custom built and with a particularly weird and disturbing collection of hobby “horses”.

This is the part of the House that has a major part in American Gods, but I will stop short of any spoilers…

Anyway, further collections include a combination distilling equipment , pipe organs and clocks

as well as a large room of weird firearms

extensive dioramas of circuses

a large collection of dolls houses

some stuff on the British Royal family (I’m almost sure that the crowns are replicas), including a Buckingham Palace dolls house

And through it all, there is an awful lot of carved ivory. Very impressive and intricately carved, but I can’t help thinking that Alex Jordan may have been single-handedly responsible for the ivory trade

and just endless other random shiz

Mad as a bag of spanners! Worth the huge detour? Of course! This is exactly what you want from a crazy roadside attraction and this is the Grandaddy! The receptionist at the hotel last night told me that they get successive generations visiting this and it becomes a family tradition. I can well imagine.

That’s another one of the bucket list then.

Just have to get back to Denver now…