Home is where our story begins—albeit someone else’s. In our search to identify 10 of Houston’s best neighborhoods, we’ve landed on 10 of Houston’s best houses, and what follows is perhaps the last form of acceptable voyeurism. Whether a 20-car garage, 60,000-gallon pool, Moroccan-tiled bathroom, or Calacatta marble island is within reach is beside the point, so long as you can appreciate it.

Not every property in these pages carries a multimillion-dollar price tag. Sometimes dream homes are the fanciest houses in the fanciest neighborhoods, sure (we’re looking at you, glass-walled showpiece of River Oaks); sometimes they’re just…cool. We lust after eccentric wallpaper and interesting lawn art as much as two-story, double-walled fireplaces and palatial vaulted ceilings.

Sticker (or square-footage) shock aside, these 10 homes are, in their own ways, monuments to Houston’s finest neighborhoods. Some are inhabited; some are on the market; together, they make a striking collage of this sprawling, disparate, wonderful city of contrasts we collectively call home.

And if you’ve got a house you love, in a place you do, too? Well, you’re already living the dream.