Queens Doesn’t Do Matchy-Matchy

What fascinates Spanish-born architect Rafael Herrin-Ferri is the wildly eclectic residential architecture of Queens, New York, for which few architects were ever responsible.

A Queens resident himself, he began walking every block of this borough in 2013, photographing the stunningly unconventional housing styles that popped up everywhere – most of which were designed by the homeowners themselves. These fanciful home designs defy description and sometimes even the laws of physics.  

What began as a personal photo project turned into a celebrated 2021 book, “All the Queens Houses,” then a companion volume in 2025, “All the Queens Gardens,” and a documentary short by filmmaker Sean Mowry, a fellow Queens resident. It premiered at DOC NYC in 2025 and quickly became a Vimeo Staff Pick. Herrin-Ferri walks us through his favorite houses and the stories behind them — the improvisations, the small acts of self-expression bolted onto a rowhouse by someone who wanted their home to look like their home, zoning aesthetics be damned.

Queens, widely recognized as the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world, never had the unified look of a Brooklyn brownstone block; it's a cacophony instead, and the film treats that as something worth celebrating.

Herrin-Ferri finds it very fitting that, “…there is actually a neighborhood called “Utopia” in the northeastern section of the borough since this captures Queens’ essence most perfectly. Not in the idealized sense the developers probably meant, but in the literal Greek meaning of ‘no-place,’ or in other words, no place with a singular identity.”

Watch the Video!

https://vimeo.com/1199532654

Photos: "All the Queens Houses" book and video

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