The Brick Weave House in Chicago

You know you’re not in Kansas anymore when the owners of a provocatively revamped horse stable in Chicago stroll you around their quirky neighborhood. Take that yellow house across the street—legend has it that the owner’s father won it in a card game. The rest of the block is a crazy quilt of turn-of-the-century worker’s cottages, bastardized Italianate three-flats, and clumsily composed yuppie townhouses known (not affectionately) as "Polish contractor specials."