Futuro: Lake George’s Flying Saucer Home

For decades, UFOs have been spotted in the skies around the world, mercurial celestial phenomena, here and then gone. Few places, however, have had a flying saucer that rested on the ground puzzling curious visitors.

Lake George Village is one of but a few spots on Planet Earth that can boast it was home to an alien-looking structure, called Futuro or Futuro House.

John Farrell, a former Lake George High School teacher who taught astronomy and other science classes, came to the school district from Suffern, New York, in 1969.

He recalls seeing Futuro. “It was located just off Canada Street down near Charlie Wood’s Gaslight Village and Waxlife USA,” said Farrell in 2013. “The flying saucer house structure was there for years and then was gone. Today there is a photograph of it at the Caldwell-Lake George Library.”

This photo, shows its location to be in the parking lot behind Waxlife USA, later Cavalcade of Cars.

Charles R. Wood (1914–2004), who has been called the “father of American theme parks,” was probably quite intrigued by the unusual-looking Futuro.

The flying saucer-type house seemed like something out of The Jetsens, a 1960s Hanna-Barbera animated television series about a late 21st century family with robotic utilities, spacecraft, and holograms.

The odd-shaped Futuro House was a product of a world fascinated with outer space and the possibilities of galactic exploration. A company from Finland prefabricated the houses in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

With flying saucer likeness and an airplane hatch door, this was a unique architectural house design. They were initially built as ski-cabins or holiday homes.

Futuro Houses were constructed in modular fashion for ease of shipment and were about 26 feet wide x 13 feet tall with 20 oval windows and several metal legs.

Each was of fiberglass-reinforced polyester plastic manufacture with a kitchen, toilet, central fireplace, and beds for eight people. A buyer of a Futuro could select an exterior color of either white, light-blue, yellow, or red.

The structure’s lightweight was a feature for modernists of the space age who desired a nomadic lifestyle. Finnish architect Matti Suuronen (1933–2013) envisioned this mobility and designed them to be able to be moved from location-to-location by helicopter transport.

Reportedly less than 100 units were constructed during the late 1960s and 1970s, but they had worldwide distribution. You can see a list of current locations here, there are none known to extant in New York State.

Production was stopped after the oil embargo of the 1973 as the price of crude oil skyrocketed. Increased shipping costs combined with the rising price of producing plastic that used oil in its manufacture, grounded Futuro.

It is uncertain where Lake George’s Futuro ended up. According to The Futuro House, the Lake George Futuro was likely sold at an auction in the fall of 1984. The site also reports another (possibly the same?) Futuro House located in Lake Placid in the 1970s.

The surrealistic flying-saucer structure was an oddity, but this ultramodern house nonetheless left its mark upon Lake George’s architectural heritage.

A version of this essay originally appeared in the Lake George Mirror, May 17, 2013.

The Lake George Mirror is America’s oldest resort paper, covering Lake George and its surrounding environs. You can subscribe to the Mirror HERE.

Illustrations, from above: Lake George Futuro House, 1976 (courtesy The Futuro House website); A photograph, reportedly from 1981, of Lake George’s Futuro House – sunlight has washed out the upper-left portion (courtesy Lake George High School, Class of 1981 & Caldwell-Lake George Library); Finnish architect Matti Suuronen, who designed the Futuro House, pictured at work in the 1960s (courtesy Matti Suurosen arkisto, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons); Futuro House design from a promotional pamphlet; a photo showing the interior of a Futuro House, 1968 (L. Beerkens, “Matti Suuronen’s Futuro – Prototype 1968 After 50 Years,” Docomomo Journal, (66), 60–67).