Inside there were vaulted brick ceilings, sturdy stone floors and generously sized rooms.
And if you squint, Qingdao's sturdy stone houses with steeply slanted roofs look almost Bavarian.
The lead roof atop the famous building's sturdy stone structure melted during the fire, which engulfed the city.
So the colonists chopped down the original forest and built farmhouses, barns, paddocks and sturdy stone fences.
The large windows were shuttered, but the sturdy stone building, which one teacher had described as "the school on top of the world," was otherwise mostly unchanged.
Alpine-feeling Pallazzuolo is very different from Semproniano, with red and green shutters on sturdy stone houses and steep wooded hills all around.
It was settled in 1853 by 40 Norwegian Moravians, and the village's sturdy stone architecture and simple, white-painted buildings still reflect that heritage.
Outside, they resemble igloos, and look much more fragile than the sturdy stone homes that make up Wright's Usonia cooperative, which is on 97 acres, about two miles east of the dome.
Doubles from €75 Spain's Guardia Civil once had their headquarters in this sturdy stone house, which dozes by a Romanesque church in a quiet town ringed by apple groves.
The villagers have erected three rows of sturdy stone dwellings with tin roofs up on the shoulder of the volcano, but it was the adjacent canyon that I wanted to visit, because I'd heard about the petroglyphs carved by ancient inhabitants all along its walls.
