A petty man built the thinnest house ever just to block his brother’s view of the sea

Ask a sibling to get you a glass of water and they’ll remind you all the horrible things you’ve done to them in the last three months.

Such is sibling pettiness.

One man, however, took the usual back-and-forth to whole new heights.

A man from Beirut, Lebanon, was so vexed with his brother inheriting the family land and constructing a building on it, he sabotaged the house.

He did the only thing he could: built the thinnest house he could in front of it.

And it wasn’t so they could be neighbors.

The petty sibling did it to block his brother’s view of the sea.

Locals in Beirut’s Manara area have shared the well-known story of the house that was built in the 1950s after a feud between the brothers.

The thin house, which is inhabitable albeit narrow, resulted in the original property losing value. And get this – he named the building Al Ba’sa, Arabic for The Grudge.

The details of the story were shared by urban planner and architect Sandra Rishani who was asked to research a forgotten story of the capital for a book.

She asked her dad, who shared the popular story of the brothers.

Writing in Arab zine Jadaliyya, she wrote: ‘I spotted right in front of me a 14-metre-high edge, no wider than one metre!

‘I had passed it many times before, had even looked at the facade, thinking, “What an intriguing, abandoned low-rise building with a sea view.”

‘Mesmerised by its “fake” facade, which at first glance made the house appear wide enough to be inhabitable, I approached the concierge of the building next door to inquire further.

“Yes, I know. It’s shocking,” he said, before I had even finished my question.

“It’s a wall. But people used to live in it”.’

The house – which he said may be the thinnest inhabitable building in the world – came to be used as a brothel before eventually being inhabited by refugees fleeing the war.

According to Sandra’s research, the livable home ranges in depth from four metres at its widest, to sixty centimetres – the depth of a closet – at its slimmest.

Ref: Property Report