06/17/2026
In April 1879, a 43-year-old French postman named Ferdinand Cheval tripped over a strangely shaped stone on his mail route. It sparked a dream he’d had years earlier, so he decided to build his own fantasy palace.
For the next 33 years, he worked on the palace, collecting stones during his mail rounds before retiring in 1896, and spent his free time building an incredible, wildly decorated structure in his garden. He was a loner who was misunderstood, and the building was locally known as the “Postman’s Folly.”
The palace was completed in 1912, and an inscription on its wall records: 10,000 days, 93,000 hours, and 33 years of hardship. Today the Palais Idéal is a famous tourist attraction in France that roughly 260,000 people visit every year.
More than a century later, his amazing creation is still standing.
