Often designed with potential climate-change-induced flooding in mind, these houseboats, floating hotels and other water-based structures prove you don’t need land to live a life of luxury. The projects include a boat acting as a camera obscura, a structure that turns seasonal flooding into an opportunity for fun, an apartment complex on the waters of Amsterdam and an update on Dubai’s seemingly fantastical Seahorse Villa vacation homes.

Guntû Floating Hotel in the Seto Island Sea

With its gabled roof and wooden construction, Guntû by architect Yasushi Horibe could easily be built somewhere on land almost exactly as it is. The luxury floating hotel features gorgeous passenger suites looking out onto the water along with a range of high-end amenities. You won’t find any of the typical ugly plastic cruise ship surfaces here; everything is lined with timber for the feeling of home.

Atelier LAVIT’s Floating Hotel in France

Ten timber structures float on the surface of a lake in southeastern France, near the city of Avignon. The Narcissus project by Atelier LAVIT is an eco-hotel with a structure that aims to “evoke primitive buildings on the shore of the lake; floating on the water like rafts or on pilotis like palafittes [stilt houses].”

2BOATS: Floating Photographic Platforms Travel Europe

One is a charming wooden shack, made of scraps, looking like something a fisherman would build. The other, the Obscurabus, is almost invisible in the water. Together they form ‘2BOATS,’ floating photo studios meandering their way through Europe’s rivers and canals to see the continent from a unique perspective. The wooden one, by Claudius Schulze, hosts workshops and discussions, while Maciej Markowicz’s creation is an oversized camera obscura.

3 Nautilus Hausbootes

A company called Nautilus makes a series of ‘hausbootes’ in various sizes, including the Nautino Mini, the Nautino Maxi, the Nautino Adventure, the Vagabund, the EI-Home and the Nautilus. Pictured here are the latter three. Each one boasts an eye-catching design and multiple terraces; check out the screened roof hatch on top of the Nautilus, which can host up to 8 adults and 2 children. The Vagabund is more compact, suited for smaller families or for use as a floating office, while the EI-Home is a more robust residence.

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All Aboard 15 Modern Houseboats Boatels More Floating Architecture

Better hope your kids remain firmly tucked into their Finding Dory-themed beds all night long lest they get a little too enthusiastic about leaning over the edge of this wall-free AirBNB floating over Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The vacation rental company is offering one lucky family of four two free nights aboard their 2-bedroom, 1-bath open platform, with a beautiful white-curtained master suite on one end and the kids’ room tucked behind it.

The platform itself is pretty cool, taking advantage of the beautiful weather and pleasant temperatures of the area, not to mention the world-class snorkeling and scuba diving. If you want to win, you’ll have to submit an essay on why your family deserves to stay at the temporary rental, and your answer better “surprise and delight” the folks at AirBNB. The winner will be selected on July 4th.

“Imagine living atop a coral garden beside a sand cay in a billowing reef home on the Great Barrier Reef,” says AirBNB on the promo page for the contest. “You feel the pull of the unknown when you peek over the edge of the coral shelf and take in your neighborhood – home to 600 types of soft and hard corals, 100 species of jellyfish, 3,000 varieties of molluscs, 500 species of worms, 1,625 types of fish, 133 varieties of sharks and rays, and more than 30 species of whales and dolphins. And somewhere, beneath you, is the most famous Blue Tang in the world.” [The latter refers to the type of fish featured in ‘Finding Dory.]

Unsurprisingly, the contest is a collaboration between AirBNB and Disney Pixar’s Finding Dory, the animated film that’s likely set to wipe out the species of fish it highlights just as it did with clownfish back in 2003. In the years since ‘Finding Nemo’ came out, more than 10 million clownfish were removed from reefs for home aquariums, causing them to go locally extinct in places like Thailand. At least viewing tropical fish in their natural habitat at the Great Barrier Reef leaves them where they belong. Just don’t go throwing any trash overboard, please, kids.