Snail space

Magalli Mayorga lives in a well-heeled neighbourhood of Naucalpan, filled with large, conventional houses that evoke many an affluent US suburb. Except the home where she lives — with her husband, Fernando, 11-year-old Alan and six-year-old Joshua — doesn’t exactly fit the mould. It is an extraordinary giant snail Photograph: Adam Wiseman/Guardian

“The idea is that, just as a snail lives inside its shell, so our world is inside our house,” Magalli Mayorga says of the structure built for her family by Mexican architect Javier Senosiain Photograph: Adam Wiseman/Guardian

To enter Casa Nautilus (a nautilus is a kind of sea snail with a smooth, coiled and chambered shell) you go through a door in a large, stained-glass wall — the equivalent of the hole from where the creature’s head and body would emerge Photograph: Adam Wiseman/Guardian

The house taps into the natural climatic drama of Mexico City: during the rainy season, downpours crash into the Perspex skylights and are channelled around the roof and down the spiral to a fountain in the garden Photograph: Adam Wiseman/Guardian

Mayorga's children milk the house’s imaginative potential for all its worth. “All their friends love coming here to play.” Photograph: Adam Wiseman/Guardian

Aside from Casa Nautilus and the flower house, Senosiain’s zany, organic constructions include houses that replicate a whale, a mythical plumed serpent and a shark. All are in the same area in Mexico City, and he keeps a close eye on his creations, living in the shark and renting out the rest. He is even wont to turn up with students in tow or an offering of azaleas, which he believes work well in the living room garden Photograph: Adam Wiseman/Guardian