A young architect built his family an experimental house in Virginia. But he could be convinced to sell.

Once Ben Pennell started building the house, it was hard to stop.

"It was like an addiction where I just kept purchasing materials," Pennell said. "The only way out was to go deeper in."

Perched on a hillside wedge in Christiansburg, Virginia, the 2,800-square-foot residence at 300 John Lemley Lane began as an experiment: A speculative house that Pennell could build in a year and weave into his classes at Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture, where he’s a visiting assistant professor of practice. It would be a teaching tool for interested students, and, if he was lucky, make some money in a sale.

In all, it took Pennell about three months to design the home, but it took him three years to build — much longer than expected. Pennell also didn’t expect the project to become his home.

The slender white building stretches up three-and-a-half floors, with exposed framing and trusses that look like construction scaffolding. It is, of course, finished and the exterior reinforcement is more decorative, hanging from the home like a lace trim. On top, a pitched roof looks normal from afar, but it's sheathed in segmented metal, evoking a bug's exoskeleton. The windows are similarly strange; squares, portholes, narrow rectangles and bulbous ovals poke the facade.

Since completing the project last year, the Pennells have lived in the house full time, at first because, after a brief stint on the market, it was an unsold spec house. In the months since, however, they haven't rushed to list the property or market it around: if you try to find the project listed online, all the available photos are, to say the least, unflattering. Most still show the empty lot. Maybe they're dragging their feet on purpose, as the home is completely unique and completely their own.

Still, Pennell said they could be convinced to sell.

Pennell has gotten lucky before in turning a design experiment into a money-making venture.

During his first teaching appointment in Brookings, South Dakota, Pennell and his wife — a landscape architect; the couple met at the Harvard Graduate School of Design — snapped up a house for next-to-nothing pandemic-era pricing. The architect had grown up in California, where homes traded for much more than nothing.

“All of a sudden, for like $160,000, I had a three-story house that was 3,000 square feet,” he described. “It was palatial.”

It was also a kind of laboratory, so, “with the loving support of my wife” and “friends kind of egging me on,” Pennell started renovating the South Dakota house in 2021, aiming to transform and flip the property. The basement went first with the addition of an eye-catching fireplace that looks like rock strata, followed by the kitchen and the attic, which got an angular dormer addition perched atop the house like an egret.

Once finished, the corrugated metal-clad home was different from its Brookings neighbors. It was so different that Pennell began to worry, panicking that it would never sell. He listed the house for rent and suddenly, “out of the clear blue sky,” a buyer materialized.

“They said, ‘look, I’m going to be honest, I like the house — I just want to buy it,’” Pennell recalled. Suddenly, Pennell and his wife found themselves one house lighter and a “pretty sizeable profit” richer.

By the time he’d moved across the country and settled into his role at Virginia Tech, living with his wife and their new baby in a Blacksburg apartment, Pennell’s fingers began itching.

“I had more confidence than you could possibly imagine,” he said, envisioning a formally experimental project that he could do in one year on a $300,000 budget. That conviction was enough to get him to buy an affordable bit of rocky land on the outskirts of Christiansburg, even though he wasn’t quite sure what he could put on it. Pennell hired someone to excavate a road on the land, and, when the excavator started talking about carving a bench into the hillside, Pennell was rapt.

“It electrified my imagination,” he explained. “I loved the way he was talking about digging and all the big rocks.” Pennell pulled the feeling close, scheming out a house that — pulling inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water — felt almost precariously perched on its lot.

“It’s kind of like it’s peeking over the edge and looking down,” he described. The exterior and framing happened in a matter of months, but the interior was where things started to balloon.

Pennel took an expansive approach, pulling inspiration from cathedrals, pyramids, Victorian architecture and California’s Craftsman-style bungalows all at once. The main floor revolved around a kitchen — with its “island serving as an altar” — that whirls up into a circus tent-like funnel. An impressionistic pendant light hangs from its opening like a mobile, channeling daylight in from a domed skylight above.

That dome? It was one of the design choices that tripled Pennel’s expected project timeline.

“We could’ve built this house in a year,” Pennell said. “But you know, instead we had a 16-foot fiberglass dome that took half a year to build.”

White walls and oak floors — another time-intensive design choice — line the project, their honey tone pulled in the stained pine and fir framing that borders the windows and doorframes. In some places, the timber rises to about waist-height, capped in millwork just like a church pew.

The white-and-oak material palette continues on the second floor, where two bedrooms and a primary bathroom boast French doors and exposed timber ceilings. “I wanted it to have this slightly new world-old world kind of thing to it,” Pennell said.

After 36 months of work, largely completed by Pennell with help from students and friends, the house was ready in October 2024. It cost $215,000 more than expected so Pennell his family — now with two young kids — decided to move in and list the home for sale, but they yanked it back off not long after. The time wasn’t right, and, strangely, the house grew on them.

“It’s technically not for sale,” Pennell said. But, he conceded, he could be convinced.

Because if this home sells, there could be another plot of land out there somewhere. And who knows what kind of house Pennell could put on that.