The Smurf House

Some homes are designed. Others are imagined—and then sculpted into being.

Tucked into the tree-lined calm of suburban Bethesda, on a quiet corner that seems like any other, sits a house that refuses to blend in. It bubbles up from the earth like a dream half-remembered, all smooth curves and strange beauty. People call it the Mushroom House. Or the Smurf House. Or, simply, that house. But whatever you call it, you won’t forget it.

This is not a home that followed blueprints. It followed instinct. In the late 1960s, local architect Roy Mason—an idealist with an artist’s eye and a futurist’s spirit—took a simple home and transformed it into something entirely new. Using polyurethane foam, mesh, and hand-sculpted concrete, Mason reshaped the house into a living sculpture: part fairytale fungus, part Gaudí-inspired reverie, all whimsy.

The result? A 30-foot-high organic form with walls that seem to melt and swell, as if the house is breathing. There are no sharp corners. No flat lines. Just a continuous, flowing rhythm—like water frozen mid-dance.

Inside, light filters through curved skylights onto an indoor pond, trees reach through stairwells, and rooms wrap around each other in gentle spirals. It's a house that doesn’t just contain life—it imitates it.

And yes, it’s still a home.

Despite its fame and its fantasy-like façade, the Mushroom House is privately owned and quietly lived in. Over the decades, it has become a local legend, a surreal outlier in a sea of colonials and ranch-style repetition. Drivers slow down to stare. Children point. Artists sketch. And all the while, someone lives inside—waking up each morning in a space that bends, curves, and surprises.

This is not a house built to impress. It’s a house built to express. To ask: What if a home didn’t need to be square? What if it could grow like a tree? Or a thought? Or a memory too strange to explain?

The Mushroom House doesn’t care if it fits in. That was never the point. It stands because someone once believed that a house could be more than shelter. That it could be a sculpture. A statement. A question.

And every time someone drives by and wonders aloud, “Who lives there?”—the house quietly answers, Someone who imagined something different. And built it.