An old quarry-based nature park in a quiet corner of the Cotswolds may sound like an odd place for an expense of architects to be doing their thing, but it’s a great place for going overboard.

And overboard they have indeed gone. Some if the UK’s top architects have designed a collection of what can only be correctly called flights of fancy rather than luxury holiday homes.

Some of the houses have roofs opening like flowers; others sit on little islands in the 600-acre water park, bedroom pods hanging like chrysalides from the ceiling. Another has revolving floors to seek out the moving sun and yet another looks like a flattened glass helter-skelter.

The place is called Lower Mill Estate and already has a listed mill on a converted quarry that for years has been a water and wildlife reserve. Publisher turned-property-mogul Jeremy Paxton bought the land six years ago and has devoted much of his efforts into making sure the wildlife reserve is as mature as it can be before he even began to build on the site.

Plans for the first eight Landmark houses, designed by Will Alsop, Piers Gough, Eva Jiricna, Sutherland Hussey, Roger Sherman, Sarah Featherstone, Alison Brooks and Richard Reid, were unveiled at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Cotswold district council has granted permission for more than 500 homes altogether, but most of these will be ‘ordinary’ contemporary buildings, defusing some of the more extravagant designs. "We have to be mindful of the context because these Landmark buildings are quite unique and we have to make sure they don't stick out like sore thumbs," said Cotswold’s principal planner Marcus Kitchen.

Paxton says he expects interested buyers to pick a design then ask for personal tweaks so the finished product is absolutely to their liking. Some of the Landmark properties will stand as ‘manor houses’ with a handful of standard homes around them; others will be in several acres of their own land. The first ‘village’ of some 80 homes has already been sold at prices between £250,000 and £2m.