[ Birds chirping ] [ Music plays ] Boscarino: I always felt like I was a bit of a pariah in the mainstream art world.

I remember this discussion when I was in -- in college, and there was all this controversy of, like, what is art and what is craft?

Someone said, "Creating and making art are a way for me to explain the world."

And then I raised my hand and I said, "Making art is a way for the world to understand me."

[ Birds chirping ] [ Music plays ] People that I knew who stayed in our hometown got married, had families and all that.

And I just thought, "I don't want any part of that."

I couldn't get out fast enough.

It was really my boyhood ambition to build my dream house, where, like, literally, all my dreams could come true.

The family lore is that we were all carpenters for many, many generations.

[ Metal clanks ] My whole life became about making things with metal, wood, glass, fabric, concrete, ceramic.

December of 1988, I started setting out to find, like, whatever dream house that was going to be.

It was the very end of a day of looking at properties.

I saw this -- "Oh, there's this cabin.

It's on five acres."

And no one even really knew that this house existed.

We parked on the road.

We had to cross this little bridge.

I took one look at this dilapidated little cabin, and I knew that this would be the place I would spend the rest of my life.

This is the house I've been looking for.

[ Music plays ] [ Birds chirping ] [ Music continues ] This house was a summer cabin retreat, but they hadn't really used it for about 10 years.

And 10 years in the woods is -- that's a lot.

I got it really just in the nick of time.

I spent that first night here ripping out everything that I could inside the house.

There were stacks of mattresses.

There was paneling.

Whatever wasn't nailed down was out the kitchen door in a big pile in the morning.

Fortunately, it didn't need any major structural repairs.

However, it was basically uninhabitable, and I actually inhabited it sort of illegally early on 'cause I -- I needed a place to live.

So I had to renovate the house while I was living in it.

And there was no insulation in the walls.

There was no heating system.

The few electrical outlets were definitely not up to code.

Any normal person, like if a family, had bought the property, the house would have been demolished.

But for me, I mean, I was 28 years old, I needed the place to live, so that was not an option.

[ Music plays ] I could have never predicted that this project would evolve into what it is now.

It started out fast and then accelerated.

[ Chuckling ] That's the way I describe it.

I painted the house primary colors, but then I decided to make the footprint of the house a little larger.

[ Camera shutter clicks ] Level one is the original cabin, as well as the main level of -- of the museum wing, where I set out to build a temple for the body and its functions.

Level two, you actually go down, and that's called the cantina.

Level three is the ballroom.

Level four is my nature lab.

Level five is my music room and folk art collection.

Level six is my thread studio, where I have my loom and my grandmother's sewing machines.

Level seven is my bedroom loft.

To access level eight, you actually have to go up a few steps to level nine.

But level nine is actually sort of like a -- well, it's actually a secret passageway.

[ Door creaks ] 10 and 11 are the roof deck.

I think of this house as a museum.

It's like Dr. Seuss meets Pee-wee Herman meets Willy Wonka meets Martha Stewart, all kind of rolled up into one.

I have always had this fantasy that, someday, Luna Parc will be on the list of great houses in America -- Monticello... the Biltmore...

The Breakers... and Luna Parc.

People come here, and they think that I'm like, "Ooh-hoo!"

-- like kooky and crazy.

It was a nightmare, as well.

[ Music plays ] There were times that it was very lean, and I was really kind of struggling financially to just support this institution.

[ Music continues ] As the years have gone on, we've both kind of like aged together.

People might think that I am kind of a hermit.

And that's fine with me... because if you do anything long enough... ...something big is going to happen.

There is such a joy and an ecstasy of making something.

I never gave a thought about having to slow down, but I have to be a little bit kinder to my body now.

So on that day that I finally do check out for good, I actually asked one of my younger assistants if he would get my ashes into this little box, maybe about 16 inches by 8 inches, set into the floor with a really thick 3/4-inch piece of glass on top.

And I'll be one of the oddities in my own personal museum.

This house will be operating in perpetuity as a museum, a sculpture park, and a very small art school, showing young people that there's an alternative way to live.

[ Music plays ] I didn't build myself a mausoleum.

I built myself an obelisk.

[ Music continues ]