The houses in the East Colfax neighborhood of Denver are mostly pretty traditional.

Neutral colors, one-car garage, small lawns in front, you know, the classic.

And then there's Steve Hartbowers house.

He was not in to the whole cookie cutter home design thing.

You know, it just lacks a little bit of soul.

I like to be able to do my own thing and, you know, not tell them,

to have people tell me, you have bays,

you have to pay your house page, you know.

Steve's an artist who moved into the neighborhood about 12 years ago and very soon

got to work making his home different.

Steve's house looks like a giant mosaic of all sorts of colors.

There are two gates that look like they came straight out of Harry Potter.

There are little figurines of all types of dogs,

there's a Virgin Mary. It can all make you forget for a second that you are in a very normal suburban neighborhood.

And it seems like that is the whole point.

I'm Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible,

and wondrous places.

And today we're headed to Denver, Colorado to hear the story of the enchanted Hart House, the home, turned in to a

campus.

After this. And the My name is Steve Hartbauer and I am an artist. I work mainly in mosaic but I weld metal and I work with found objects.

When Steve and his wife Amy got married,

they had been talking about working on some kind of massive project together.

...