10,000 days, 9,300 hours, 33 years of toil. That is how long it took one man to single-handedly build his fairytale palace.
At least so says an inscription at the Palais Idéal, an extraordinary, dream-inspired structure in Hauterives, France. This whimsical creation has been called one of the greatest works of surreal architecture, yet a humble postman with no knowledge of architecture built it.
This obsessive postie was Ferdinand Cheval (1836—1924), who was apparently inspired to erect the palace after he tripped over an oddly shaped stone. Far from knocking any sense into him, the incident led to decades of painstaking work building 10m-high walls, tunnels, stairs and gateways and smothering them with his writings and naïve statuettes of gods, giants, temples and exotic fauna and flora.
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