Kids crawl into the enormous play net—and parents wonder whether they'll ever see them again
Spot Cool Stuff’s inner child is still very active. Readers have probably noticed that from all our reviews of cool toys and family travel destinations that may appeal equally to adults and kids. So no wonder that we are also fans of playgrounds.
The world is, thankfully, full of creative, well-conceived plays for kids to safely play. Here’s a look at seven of our favorites:
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If you have a backyard you can have a private office. So says OfficePod, a British company that manufactures eponymous pre-fabricated one-room office structures.
When designing their OfficePod the company had four goals for the product:
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With enough money, modern technology and piped-in water anyone can build a luxury resort in the middle of a desert. (Exhibit #1: Las Vegas.) But building a luxury resort in the middle of the desert in a completely environmentally sustainable way—that’s a challenge. Yet Oppenheim, an architecture firm based in (of all places) the desert-deprived state of Florida, managed exactly that with their design for an eco-resort in Jordan’s Wadi Rum desert.
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Covering a typical house recycles between 600 and 1,000 car and truck tires
Nearly any solid object could be used to construct a roof. Choosing roofing material that’s durable—and protects what’s underneath—is the tricky part. Here’s a review of three unusual objects that creative designers have used for their home roofs:
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Spot Cool Stuff has mixed feelings about building grandiose tourist infrastructure like the Langkawi Sky Bridge and the Grand Canyon Skywalk. We want to keep natural spaces natural. Yet some of the architecture that encroaches upon nature is fantastically cool.
So it is (sort of—we’ll get to that part soon) with the proposed Glacier Discovery Walk in Canada’s Jasper National Park near Banff.
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There’s something inherently cool about taking a structure conceived for an animated movie or TV show and building it for real.
Spot Cool Stuff regulars may remember our piece on the the real life Simpsons house constructed in Nevada. Building an accurate rendition of that was difficult enough—and it was a regular suburban dwelling. Imagine the challenge of building the house featured in the Pixar hit movie Up. That house was attached to balloons and was able to fly!
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