Tulsa’s futuristic ‘Jetsons house’ flies off the market

theguardian.com:

The Jetsons hailed from Orbit City in the year 2062 – but they might have felt right at home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 40 years earlier.

Tulsa hosts a building that looks a lot like George and Jane Jetsons’s home in the cartoon, or perhaps a squat version of Seattle’s Space Needle – shaped like a wheel on its side perched on a stick. It contains an elevator that lifts you up a 44ft tube to a round living area with windows all along the walls, commanding remarkable views of surrounding greenery. A balcony juts out on one side.

The house recently hit the market, with an asking price of $415,000. But unfortunately for any time travelers, it has already been snapped up.

The two-bedroom, three-bath house was completed in 2005 by Joe Damer, a local resident, with the help of Jeremy Perkins, a Tulsa architect.

Damer, who died in 2019 at the age of 78, was German and moved to the area after the second world war through the Displaced Persons Act, which helped resettle refugees. He had a welding business and built the house in his free time, Tulsa World reported.

Damer brought the concept to Perkins “and I kind of laid it out for him scale-wise,” Perkins told the Guardian. Damer “was just very, very hands-on, kind of a master craftsman, and just figured things out,” he said.

Damer told Tulsa World in 2003 that he’d been inspired by a postcard he had kept since 1965. The photo in the postcard, according to the realtor, Angela Barnett of Chinowth and Cohen, shows a similar building in Arizona. The postcard is still on display in the home, she said.

Though The Jetsons may not have been at the top of Damer’s mind, it’s possible that he and the animators drew inspiration from the same source. The architecture in The Jetsons – which debuted in 1962,