Cookie Jar House

If a passing giant took the roof off of this house in Glendora, New Jersey, and reached in, it could be forgiven for being confused to find people living there. The house looks just like a huge cookie jar.

Originally built either in 1947 or 1949, the house was designed not to look like a sweet kitchen fixture, but to withstand atomic blasts; the semi-spherical body was intended to deflect the force of a bomb dropped on a nearby city, like Philadelphia.

There were plans to create an entire community of round houses like this one, but it was the only one that was ever built. The roof was flat, originally, and the façade was stucco. Today, the outside is covered with formstone.

It looks like a small house, but is reportedly very spacious, if hard to furnish due to the lack of corners. There is a bathroom and a garage on the first floor, a living room and a kitchen on the second floor, and two bedrooms on the top floor, all wrapped around a spiral staircase that makes moving furniture difficult. There is a deck in the back and a widow’s walk around the conical roof, accessed by the spiral staircase. In the front yard, at least until the owners sell it for somewhere in the neighborhood of $165,000 (if you’re in the market), is a headless statue from China.

While there are other houses in the United States that look like kitchen fixtures, this is reportedly the only one that so closely resembles a cookie jar. The owners and renters at the private residence know that it might attract tourists, but people mostly keep a respectful distance when they come by to take pictures. The best time for photos is when there are no leaves on the large tree out front, or at Halloween, when in the past the house has been decorated to resemble a giant jack-o-lantern.