Home of A Thousand Faces – Radium Hot Springs, British Columbia - Atlas Obscura
Home of A Thousand Faces is permanently closed.

Home of A Thousand Faces

Outsider art meets hard scrabble mountain life in this woodcarver's home/art piece. 

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Tucked away in the forested mountains of British Colombia, the cobbled together Home of A Thousand Faces mixes outsider art with grizzled mountain culture. 

The hectic mountain structure is the home and workspace of Rolf Heer (AKA The Radium Woodcarver), a crazy-quilt of a man who specializes in carving sculptures with a chainsaw. Scrapped wooden panels and mismatched doors make up most of the outer walls of the abode, with each piece of the wall covered in a cryptic message such as “Emergency Entrance, Ladies Only” and ” No Two or 4 Leg Dogs.” Inside the walls the grounds are covered in Heer’s sculptures which are almost entirely carvings of a bearded man’s face in logs and smaller pieces of wood. The Radium Woodcarver is also known to keep goats on the roof of his shack just in case visitors to the cacophonous residence feel as though it is not eccentric enough.    

Update: On November 23, 2018, this location was entirely destroyed by fire. The owner escaped.

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At the corner of Kootenay Highway (#93) and Madsen Road, near the junction with Highway 95.

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