Looming up and up and ... creaking worryingly, it looks like the evil masterpiece of a fairytale villain, built to imprison his princess.

But the architect of what is thought to be the world's tallest wooden house is a character right out of a Russian gangster film.

There may have been more than one Rapunzel for the man, who isn't too clear on how many children he has and says he dreamt up the house to be a headquarters for his loves and his business.

His hand-built wooden skyscraper towers over the run-down suburbs of the squat concrete Russian city of Arkhangelsk, on the edge of the northern White Sea, rising 12 floors and 43 meters - or about as tall as the Statue of Liberty.

The building looks like an enormous amalgam of gothic garden sheds; cornices, towers, stair-cases and bay windows pile up, topped by an unfinished wooden spire, unroofed and open to the elements.

On its dingy first floor, ex-convict Nikolai Sutyagin pushes rusted nails, stale coffee and fishing tackle to one side to unfurl pencil-sketched floor plans of his record-breaking edifice.

Shoving his round specs up his nose he points with a tattoo- covered arm, "This was to be a bar for foreigners ... and this would have been a great floor for making love."

Sutyagin, 60, who grew rich during Perestroika (the restructuring of the Soviet economy under former president Mikhail Gorbachev), says he built the house because he didn't know how else to spend the money.

In and out of youth correctional homes in his teenage years, Sutyagin made a small fortune as a freelance farm hand and factory worker under a quirk of the Soviet planned economy that allowed for migrant laborers to be paid based on performance.

With that he founded a small construction company, and 16 years ago began his crazy climb.

What should have been a two-storey house ballooned into an eccentric mishmash of all his schemes, resulting from an undefinable personal aesthetic and research trips to Norway, Germany and Japan.

"It was two floors, but the roof looked wrong, like a mushroom ... I thought I should use the attic space better, get the right proportions. So I kept building," he says with a definite grin. "until I got a good view of the White Sea."

But the structure butting resolutely skyward is only an empty shell, full of precarious gaps and hair-raising climbs, and is under perpetual threat of demolition by authorities.

It was never completed because Sutyagin was given a four-year prison sentence for kidnapping and beating one of his employees, whom he says robbed him of 30,000 dollars (20,440 euros).

While in jail, Sutyagin was cleaned out. Now he lives with his young wife in the unkempt, rotting wood rooms at the base of the tower.

"I don't take visitors up anymore, they lose their cool half-way up. The last guy started crying - it's a waste," the recluse complains.

"But," he adds, changing his mind, "you should really see the view up there."