It would I believe be considered strange if I did not include 'The House in the Clouds' in Thorpeness in our list of Suffolk Curiosities, but I think one could argue that the whole of the coastal village of Thorpeness could be included under the category 'curiosities'.  

The entire village of Thorpeness was the inspiration of the playwright and barrister Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie whose family home was at the nearby village of Sizewell.  When Ogilvie inherited the estate in the early 1900s he decided to convert the fishing hamlet of Thorpe into a fantasy model village.

Ogilvie was friends with J M Barrie the, author of The Adventures of Peter Pan and it was his stories of Peter Pan that were the inspiration behind the village of Thorpeness. 

An immediate problem for this new model village was the supply of water.  However, Ogilvie did not want a large water tank creating an eye sore in his village so he employed a method of disguising which he had already used to great effect at his family home of Sizewell, where there he disguised the water tank as a dovecote.   

In Thorpeness he turned the water tank into a house with clapboard walls, mock windows and a pitched roof.  When the village was eventually linked to the mains water supply the tank inside was dismantled and the area is now used as additional living accommodation.