A snapshot of a couple "contour houses" I once built on the SoFurry minecraft server. With a contour house, I pick a hill top and build a house which roughly follows its contours. Then, for each floor I add to it, I expand it outward by one block on each axis, gradually building the house up into a massive structure. Sometimes, I'll pick two hilltops and make the two houses eventually join together on an upper level, as is the case with the structure on the left.

Snapshot taken with version 1.16 of Minecraft, using one of the Dokucraft texture packs, and optifine shaders (I forget which shader pack I used, though)