Courtney Johnson’s tram house.Photo:Courtney Johnson/TikTok
Courtney Johnson/TikTok
“This specific house used to be an Airbnb and I saw it and printed it out and posted it on my vision board in high school,” she says. “All these years later, it’s the house I ended up buying.”
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The fact that the house requires a ride in a tram car to arrive at the front door did deter some buyers, she acknowledges — but not her.
“It was on the market for a while … but I live in a neighborhood full of hippies so honestly, my house is not even the weirdest thing in this area,” she says with a laugh.
Courtney Johnson.Courtney Johnson/TikTok
“It’s so much easier than when I lived in an apartment and had to walk up stairs and down a hallway with my groceries. Now I just put my bags on a tram and it brings them up for me,” she tells PEOPLE.
Courtney Johnson’s tram house.Courtney Johnson/TikTok
But the tram is the easiest way to enter the home, and takes three minutes to get to the first stop (her front door) and three minutes and thirty seconds to get to the second stop (a guest bedroom upstairs, complete with its own private entrance).
She admits that there are some challenges — namely, the maintenance required of the tram itself.
“There are tram maintenance companies here as some people have trams to go to their docks,” she notes.
Courtney Johnson’s tram house and her dog, Pepa.Courtney Johnson/TikTok
And while the tram itself hasn’t broken down, it does stop working during power outages (or any hard freezes that paralyze the Texas power grid).
There’s also, she notes, a lot of confusion that comes from those encountering the tram for the first time.
“Delivery people sometimes freak out,” she acknowledges, adding that she puts “place on tram” in delivery instructions for Amazon drivers.
And while late architect Ray Brown designed the house to look like a fishbowl, Johnson says it feels more like a “crazy, funky treehouse” — albeit one that’s pretty remote.
“I’m not necessarily a private person. I’m a content creator on social media, after all,” she says. “But I do like getting away from the city and having my own little space to get away and be in nature. It’s a really peaceful place to live.”
source: people.com
