Honestly, we didn’t see this one coming.

Congratulations to the beautiful Humboldt Coastal Nature Center — do inanimate buildings care when you praise them? do they feel? — for winning this week’s Humboldt Approved. Formerly known as the Stamps House — since it was the retirement home of Charles and Rachel Stamps — the building was purchased by Friends of the Dunes in 2007. (More history can be absorbed here.)

Our knee-jerk guess for which local structure would take home this distinction was the Carson Mansion. But while LoCO‘s ever-positive comment host DISQUS no longer lists how many downvotes a comment receives (we’re bummed too, btw) it seems there was some backlash against the home of The Ingomar Club — note that even with its 62 votes, it falls beneath the Humboldt County Library’s 36 votes, an indicator that there’s some hate going on. Is it the exclusivity, people?

No matter. The HCNC wins this outright. Dune good.

PREVIOUSLY: All Past Humboldt Approved Winners

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Well, we hope you all enjoyed the super romantic dates you went on with the intel gleaned from last week’s Humboldt Approved. For this week’s dumb, small town popularity contest we want to know more about your taste in human-made structures. 

So what is Humboldt’s “best” building? See, this is one of the weeks when we’re hoping that the vagueness of the question will elicit creative responses. Like, what makes a building “the best”? That’s what we’re hoping you’ll figure out for us. Is it how the building looks? How functional it is? The activities that occur inside its walls? The fact that you got drunk there one time and that great thing happened? This is your “best,” friend.

Below is your weekly reminder on how to not waste your vote (some people will never not. We get it): 

To vote, look through the comments of this Humboldt Approved poll. If someone has already nominated the answer you would give for this week’s category, click the upvote arrow. If you don’t see your desired Humboldt Approved answer nominate it in a comment for others to upvote. (Please be careful to not duplicate answers; redundant answers will be deleted and potential associated upvotes will be lost.) Feel free to make your case by replying to/cheering on the answer you love most, but again the number by the arrows on the initial nomination is what counts.

You can vote for as many nominees as you deem worthy but, of course, the more you do that the more watered down your initial vote becomes. That’s math.

We reserve the right to delete superfluous/lame comments that make the voting/comment section hard to sift through. Please try not to get offended when your comment battle reply is deleted. We’re trying to do something here.

While many weeks we look for two winners — one winner from the metropolises of Eureka and Arcata, and one from Humboldt’s smaller communities — due to the nature of this category, this time we’re gonna limit it to one. Voting closes next Friday at noon and soon after a winner will be declared.

Now tell us your fav building, HumCo.

Those are blueprints, if that’s not clear.