Since Mojang Studios released Minecraft in 2011, it has become and still is the seminal creative sandbox game. Minecraft lets players create to their heart’s content from a faithful reproduction of Peter Jackson’s vision for Minas Tirith in the Lord of the Rings movies, a 1 to 1 scale build of the tallest building on earth, the Burj Khalifa, or an actual recreation of the earth itself. While you may not have the time or money to spend creating these masterpieces even on Creative Mode (these builds take from days to years after all), you’d still want your builds to look the best they can. To help you with that, here’s our list of the Best Minecraft house ideas for your ideal home!
Our List for the Best Minecraft House Ideas
In our list of the best Minecraft house ideas, you’ll see a mix of simple, complex, practical, and aesthetic houses with differing build difficulties. Although these are just a list of ideas, we’ll add YouTube tutorials when we can. If there aren’t any videos available, we’ll add a few pictures so you can get the feel of the building before making it yourself instead. Before you start construction, though, we suggest looking at a few tips we’ve added near the end of this article to help make it easier for you, even on Survival Mode.
If you haven’t installed Minecraft on your Android phone yet, you might want to look at our guide on how to download and install the Minecraft APK.
Modern House
It has clean interiors with tons of space, glass-covered walls and ceilings to let natural light in, and white walls with a sleek angled-shaped exterior. A true epitome of modern Minecraft engineering. These are the types of houses you’d see in typically affluent modern suburbs like Hollywood or Silicon Valley. Game-wise, it’s quite easy to make since it’s mainly made out of quartz, concrete, and glass with a few bits of wood here and there.
For this house, we suggest building it on a flat plain with enough space for expansions and other additions like a pool or a small berry garden. There’s a good chance once you’re done with your build, you’ll end up wanting to do a nice suburban village instead!
Underground Base House
Everyone knows that the simplest “house” you can build in Minecraft is literally a hole in the ground to pass the night in. Out of all the Minecraft house ideas we have on this list, this one takes underground holes and pushes it up to 11! Storage rooms, armories, libraries, enchanting rooms, and even farms — the possibilities of this build are endless.
Instead of having just one small underground house, you could expand your build to create cavernous underground villages crisscrossing the land. After building that, populating them with villagers, and giving them all jobs, you might want to learn the tips and tricks to understanding Minecraft villager trading to get as much emerald as you can possibly need.
Traditional Japanese House
Although there are a lot of guidelines and customs on what can be added to a private traditional house in Japan, you’re free to add whatever you’d want in your Minecraft home! This design is an elegant mix of common features present in traditional Japanese buildings. From its raised construction, torii gate, and the Irimoya-zukuri (hip-and-gable) style roof, it has a lot of things you could customize. For example, you could change the roof to a mix of the new copper stair blocks or use glass instead of fences for windows.
Mountainside House
Another variation of the Minecraft basics of dig and make a home to pass the night in, carving your way into a cliff or mountain face to make a home isn’t a new idea. That said, we’ve had our own share of building mountain homes, and this is one of the best we’ve seen so far (at least compared to our feeble cavemen houses).
Similar to the underground base home, a mountainside home has a lot of potential for expansion. After creating most of your needed rooms, you could also start digging down and integrate a mine into your build instead of digging horizontally into the mountain. Another thing you could do is create your own version of the Mines of Moria and live out your dwarven lifestyle.
Fortified Medieval House
Since we’d already shown you a traditional Japanese house, why not go for a western one instead? A simple defensive wall with lanterns to light up the night and a small watchtower to look out for invaders. This build has the look and presence of a liege lord’s small countryside manor, which makes it perfect for players who want to create their own medieval towns.
The creator of this tutorial, andyisyoda, has a playlist of similar builds for the necessities of medieval towns like taverns and forges.
Adobe House
Adobe — not the photo editing software — is actually a Spanish term for mud bricks. These bricks give the house its distinct brown color. While you can’t make mud bricks in Minecraft, terracotta blocks are a wonderful substitute. This is one of the houses that fit perfectly in specific biomes, specifically deserts, savannas, and mesa biomes.
Compared to others on this list of Minecraft house ideas, there isn’t a lot of customization you could do for this build aside from extending the buildings’ height or width.
Igloo House
Although the game already has a few tundra and taiga biome villagers living in their small igloos, the houses all look small, cramped, and quite generic. While small, you can customize this igloo with all your needs, including a forge and an enchantment area if needed. In addition, you could increase the sides by one extra block and connect it to other igloos if you still need more space. It would let you make an expansive arctic base for yourself if you connect enough igloos. With a big enough base, you can feel like you’re exploring the great white unknown in the times of the northern expeditions!
Winter House
Compared to the igloo house, the winter cabin is simpler and feels more rustic. While this build may look a lot like a hovel, it’s quite easy and fast to build since it only uses basic blocks. Due to the ease and speed of construction, it’s good as a starting base for players who get spawned into snow and taiga biomes. If you have a cross-platform Minecraft server with a spawn point in cold biomes, we suggest popping up a few of these nearby to help new players out before they get experienced enough to make their own bases elsewhere.
Hanging House
Do you want to get rid of your acrophobia and your fright of going anywhere high? Well, this Minecraft house idea may help you slightly get over that fear, at least in the game. A hanging house is exactly what it says on the cover — a house suspended over a high place or on a steep overhang. This house idea lets you have a great mountain top view with a commanding position of the entire area if you place it right.
While this house is easy to make when you’re in Creative Mode, we suggest you use the sneaking feature and scaffolding blocks when doing this build on Survival Mode. Doing so prevents you from accidentally going on a free fall dive onto the earth.
Tower House
The Tower of Orthanc and the Eye of Sauron are two of the most well-known towers in literature. While you can’t be a wizard like Saruman or have a gigantic fiery eye on your Minecraft tower, you could live and have all the essentials inside your very own tower house! This is another one of the harder builds in this list of Minecraft house ideas. Although it looks complicated at a glance, once you’re used to making tower houses, you’ll find that they’re the perfect house to build in the middle of pre-spawned villages.
Jungle Tree House
We could make another Lord of the Rings reference here, but we’ll spare you from that. Instead, we’ll say that the jungle treehouse is every kids’ childhood dream come true. Who wouldn’t want to live in a gigantic treehouse? Although we did add a YouTube video to DiddiHD’s tutorial, it’s not as planned as the others on this list since your final build will depend on your own imagination and Minecraft skills. We suggest trying to make this kind of house after gaining some experience with smaller creations first.
Japanese Pagoda
Similar to the jungle treehouse, the Japanese pagoda is another gigantic tower house build due to its height and size. It has a roomy interior that you can easily exploit by filling it with your crafting necessities.
You could create a sizable Japanese-style village for yourself if you combine this with a few of the Japanese houses we introduced earlier on this list. For those planning to do just that, you should take a look at Cortezerino’s Japanese build tutorial playlist for other decorations and buildings your town would need.
Greek House
A house with a relaxing Mediterranean feel, the only thing you’d need now are a few gyros. You’d do yourself a favor if you build one of these on the beach or overlooking the sea. This house is quite simple, with easily sourced materials that you can get on almost any biome. Although the tutorial used only blue and cyan banners, you could add some red ones to even it out and change the feeling.
Spanish Villa
A mid-sized build, this Spanish villa looks a lot like the traditional haciendas you’d see in Latin and Caribbean countries. Because of that inspiration, this villa is quite spacious with a wonderful courtyard and terracotta walls. You’ll have a lot of ways to customize your own interpretation of this building when you start building!
Semi-Underwater House
This is one of the truly unique houses on this list. Frankly, it’s cool enough to look like something a Bond movie villain would have as an evil lair. A semi-underwater house and a seaside manor rolled into one, this house idea is best since the glass walls let you see into the blue depths without getting wet. Depending on how you build it, you could end up with one of the most beautiful houses you can make with this Minecraft house idea!
Sheep House
An oddly-shaped house, the sheep house basically lets you live in your own humongous sheep! We actually found this Minecraft house idea while watching Watame, a sheep vtuber, create a sheep house version of herself using wool. Although we couldn’t find a tutorial on making the house itself, we did find one that created a sheep-shaped sheep farm instead. The sheep house is one of the cutest house ideas we’ve ever seen. If it doesn’t tickle your fancy, though, you could easily use the template to create other Minecraft animal houses from it instead (like this lava-spewing Miko-headed llama house).
Bridge House
Everyone has probably heard the song “London Bridge is Falling Down,” but few probably know why it fell down. Two of the theories involve houses built on the bridge. The theories say the houses got too heavy and caused it to collapse or that the houses burnt, and so did most of the bridge. Compared to London Bridge, though, your bridge house would probably be alright, so long as you don’t play with lava.
Fallen Log House
The last on our list of Minecraft house ideas is another relatively simple one — a fallen log house. Anyone who’ve seen the giant redwoods and sequoias in California has probably thought about how it would feel to carve one out and live in it. As shown in the video, a house like this looks really good when it’s built over large land fissures and crevasses acting as a bridge between the two. The best feature of this type of house is that it’s scalable. You can easily make it bigger or smaller depending on the size you’d want it to be and the resources you have on hand.
Tips When Constructing Your Build
When you’re making your Minecraft house ideas into actual Minecraft houses, there are a few things you should remember and do to make it easier for yourself. These are general tips that may or may not be available depending on your Minecraft version.
Use Lightning Rods
Lightning rods attract lightning in an area 64x64x64 around it during thunderstorms. It prevents lightning from hitting nearby flammable blocks like wool, wood, or hay. Make your rods are far away from redstone, though, as a lightning strike on a rod acts as a redstone switch.
Build Everything!
You don’t need to stock up on just raw materials since you’ll also need to build the tables and blocks to process them on, as well. The very basics you’ll need are a smithing table, an enchanting table, an anvil, and a grindstone.
Go Sneaking
Toggling sneaking or crouching mode protects you from falling over the edge of a block. This is important when you go precarious that might see you go on a nose dive to the ground.
Befriend Animals
While most animals like sheep, cows, or chickens can be corralled, you can also tame wolves and cats. Wolves ward away skeletons and chase them, while cats do the same for creepers.
Campfires for Design
Place campfire blocks underneath half-sized blocks to make it appear as though steam or smoke is coming out of it. You can also use these to simulate hot baths or hide them inside the ends of chimneys.
Install Shaders
You can use shaders to improve the graphics quality of your Minecraft game. Some give better lighting while others change the water quality to realistic levels. If you don’t know which ones to download and use, we have a guide on the best Minecraft shaders you can look to for help.
Minecarts as Seats
Since there aren’t really “seats” you can build in Minecraft, you can place a minecart on the ground, add trap doors as armrests, and a door as a backrest to make it look like a chair.
Use a Gaming Controller
For long gaming sessions, the touch screen controls might tire your hands out. To prevent that, you might want to invest in a smartphone controller.
Sweet Berry Bushes Save Lives
When you don’t have any water sources or slime blocks, berry bushes are a good substitute. These bushes may damage you, but they also negate all fall damage.
Mods are Your Friend
Even better than shaders, mods can change your entire game. Some mods are small and add an item or two, while others overhaul the entire game. Here’s our list for the best Minecraft mods you might want to try.
Use Scaffolding
Scaffolding is easy to use and create. All you need is some string and bamboo, and you’ll have a good way to reach high places for your builds. You won’t need to keep destroying your dirt block towers.
Armors and Potions
When you’re building or exploring a new area for materials, it’s good to have good armor on and the right potions on hand. We have a Minecraft brewing guide you can look through, as well as one on armors and an armor stand.
Praise the Sun!
Light and the sun are your friends. Try to saturate your build area with as many light sources as you can to stop enemies from spawning in the dark areas near it.
Build Your Own Minecraft House Today
Although it wasn’t that exhaustive of a list, we hope you found at least one of the Minecraft house ideas on this list interesting enough to build. Minecraft continues to roll out updates and new blocks that will give you a lot of options to choose from with any of your future builds. By mixing and matching your materials, every single house can really be unique.
If your phone is having a hard time rendering and playing Minecraft with mods and shaders, you might want to upgrade to one of the devices on our list of the best gaming phones and gaming tablets.
