Or ... 
 
 • A traveler who, while visiting Germany, gave permission for someone to build on the lot -- with the provision that enough land be left for a second house. To neighbors the 830-square-foot house on the corner of 24th Avenue East and East Boston in Montlake is an icon; but what the home, known as the Montlake Spite House, lacks in size it more than makes up for in story, myth and legend. The listing agent describes it best when she says the original owner took full advantage of the pie-shaped property by creating a pie-shaped home; the back of the home is just 4.5 feet wide and the front is only 15 feet. Legend has it that the home, on a mere sliver of a lot, was built by: 
 
 • A woman who won only a bit of yard in a divorce settlement, while her ex got the rest of the property, including the (normal-shaped) house they'd shared. But that's not true, according to The Stranger. It went up in 1925; the next-door neighbor who wanted the sliver of land it sits on made the landowner such a low offer that he responded by building the little house right up in the neighbor's face. Still, there are so many examples of cranky citizen's constructions to irritate adjacent landowners that Wikipedia has an entry for both a spite house and the less-expensive revenge, a spite fence.
– From the front, a half-million-dollar home on the Re/Max website looks like a quaint Spanish Revival in the heart of Seattle. Head to the side for a different perspective, and you'll see appearances are deceiving. You're looking at what Yahoo says locals call the "Montlake Spite House," an 860-square-foot sliver of a house that's legendary even among tiny houses. The front of the pie-shaped home built in 1925 is just 15 feet wide, while the back comes in at under 5 feet wide, KOMO reported in 2013, the last time the house was up for sale. Eugene Smith, a retired professor at the University of Washington who wrote a book on area history, says the wedge-like residence "was certainly the oddest of all the bungalows" in the area. "It was the smallest, most peculiar shape," he told KOMO. And the story behind its supposedly spiteful construction is just as strange as its shape. Yahoo dug up a few origin tales, including that it may have been built by an enraged landowner to spite a neighbor for a lowball offer on the land, per the Stranger. It also may have been a revenge move by a long-ago owner, said to have given permission for someone to build a home while he was traveling, as long as there was room left for his own house, which … there wasn't, really, Quirksee has reported. But one of the catchiest stories, offered by the Oregonian, claims a divorce judge awarded the original, larger home to the husband, and a tiny portion of land to the wife, who then built this minuscule abode to be up in her ex's face. These days there's a law on the books against such a "malicious erection," which involves building a structure to purposely "spite, injure or annoy" neighbors by blocking their view, access, or light. (A secret of the "tiny house" movement.)