You want your home design to stand out from the crowd? To be a bit different to your friends? Have a home that is completely unique? (well, almost … there is at least one person that has created this effect before) … Just dig a few feet of earth out from under the foundations of one side of your house. No, the effect of uniqueness does not come from the fact that one end of the house is completely open to the air, with open-brick features (lying around on the ground!) and splintered exposed beams. It works, honest, I’ve seen it Mum! The Crooked House pub in England has used a structural...

Such a gorgeous, detailed, and artistic door and knocker! This lion’s head knocker is on the door of Cologne Cathedral, in Koln in Germany. It is far from the cathedral’s only feature though – the whole building has a history spanning the hundreds of years it took to build it, its ravages in several wars, and the illustrious contributors to the cathedral’s architecture. There are plenty of lions head knockers in our range, but this one stands out for its size, firstly. It is among the three largest cathedrals in the world, it has a bell which weighs 3.8 tonnes, and quires engineered to...

You will all be starting to think that we have misspelt our company name on the site, and that it is really Artchitectural Classics – or perhaps that we are on the payroll of the UK Centre for the Arts – with yet another post on architecture-related art. Luminox in Oxford a couple of months ago is the subject. Like the Salt Mines in Poland, or the Ice hotel in Sweden complete with chandeliers, this post makes you wish you had been there… It was the creation of a French artist, Carabosse, and basically involved turning off all electric light to Oxford Square from around 7pm, and lighting...

People have long been able and willing to justify the effort and time taken to create many amazing things in the name of religion and honoring higher powers. This faith and the things it can create are seen in the oddest of spots, including this salt mine in Poland, which houses a chapel with chandeliers that have crystals made of salt! They are a lot more durable than the ice chandelier that we saw in Sweden, and also throw a strange dusky night time light. In the eighteenth century, lead-cut crystal became much more common with the advent of new technologies, and people also found that it made...

The Ice Hotel is located in Jukkasjärvi in Sweden – a shivering 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle! All of the ice in the hotel, including the gorgeous clear columns, the intricate chandelier, and the impressive walls comes from the River Torne. This river apparently produces the clearest ice possible, because of the water’s purity and the steady movement of the river. It has an eerie, solemn, alien look to most of it, and the ice chandelier that you see at the start of the movie is one of the touches that makes it seem a bit more accessible and human. You could otherwise believe...

Perhaps the world’s most unusual chandelier is in the ossuary in Sedlec, in what used to be Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. It may seem, when you first look at it, to be the world’s most macabre chandelier – perhaps a relic of a long-forgotten Church of Satan – but it is not. The cemetery there at one time had some earth from Golgotha, the hill on top of which Christ was crucified, sprinkled on it. Soon, people from far and wide wanted to be buried with the soil which might have held Christ’s blood. So the cemetery outgrew it’s original capacity, and especially during the Black...

Chandeliers have been a symbol of opulence and affluence for so long, that man has discovered strange, beautiful and most of all, monster-sized ways to make them! While we are well aware that it is not always size that counts most in how impressive something is, we’ve compiled this preliminary list of the 7 biggest chandeliers in the world, to give you a bit of inspiration about your own at home. While yours may not be architect-designed, and if it were a hundredth the size of one of these, still mightn’t fit through your front door, it’s your own! It’ll be a tiny piece of luxury, to remind...