It’s one of those ideas I have every few years to buy a chunk of land and put a dome house on it. I went to a wedding that was in a dome church and thought the building was cool but my wife can’t get past the ugly exterior.
I’d be interested to hear about observations from people that have lived in a dome about the good bad and ugly of it all.
Are energy costs lower due to the shape/air circulation, is storage space a problem, do you like it or hate it overall, and so on.
Dome dwellers would recommend it to others or not?
I have a friend who lived in one for some time- it was about half of his family home. The storage space was huge, the heating cost low, and the acoustics were really, really weird. More details I cannot say, as I don’t know them.
I had some friends that lived in one on a mountain outside of Santa Cruz. The drawbacks that I recall are that there was a lot of wasted space and that it was always cold in the winter (despite all the claims of energy efficiency). I’d like to live in one for the safety.
My broither-in-law built a dome in the 80’s with some friends.
It was a cabin-sized affair in the woods, shared kind of like a time-share.
He found several problems right off.
One is that the space is expensive to heat.
Another is that, at least in his case, the construction proved to be noisy - and sounds would “re-appear” at the far side of the building. If you’ve ever done a tour of a grand building with a circular room, like a state capitol’s rotunda, they always brag that a whisper on one side can be heard on the other side. So a toilet flush or doing dishes would make a racket in the sleeping lofts.
Within an easy bike ride of my last job is a pretty big Buckminster-Flleresque geidesic Dome house. I was so amazed by it that I talked to the owner. He said that he built it himself, and has never had any of the problems with leakage other people had. It’s an impressuive-looking and large dome, with all the amenitries. Hippy heaven it ain’t . I didn’t get to see the inside, though.
There’s a dome house on Topsail Island in North Carolina. It’s about the only house that always survives the hurricanes intact. I’ve never seen the inside, but it seems very structurely sound.
Good deal, we evacuated for Rita and were worried about the house. That was the first time I’ve ever left home and really worried about loosing all of our stuff.
I’m still hoping somebody that personally lives in a dome checks in with some* inside* details. I’ll go read the other dome thread to see if anybody did over there.
John - This Book has been such an inspiration for me and members of my family. The Author originally published his book Shelter in the late 70’s early 80’s, I don’t know how old you are but I still have my copy of it, and it has inspired some really fun additions and such that we have put on our homes throughout the years.
Check out my Treehouse threads on these boards in the archive. I built a 800sqft heated treehouse office at my last home in Connecticut - it was very fun and we had a blast doing it. The thread has pics and everything.
As for your domes, they are fun to build, great conversation peices for when you entertain, and extremely earth friendly. I would highly recommend getting some quoted on a build.
If you have more pointed questions please email me and I’d be happy to chat!
How about a house built on the pattern of a half-cylinder? It seems like it should simplify room layout and still offer some of the safety aspects of the dome.
I considered building one, but was talked out of it by a friend who pointed out that the shape of the panels does not divide into a 4X8 sheet of plywood evenly. This results in much waste.
I wound up buying the family homestead after my parent died. Before this all worked out I was ready to buy a couple of acres at the edge of my friends farm and build a dome for myself.
I did a lot of reading up and was taken with the idea of buying a whole kit. The triangles and lumber are all pre cut and color coded. Everything is shipped to you on a truck and you just follow the instructions.
Hanging pictures on the walls is a bit of a problem. I guess you should just mount them flat. It’s a bit weird though.
And all points of the ceiling are closer. Can’t push a couch against the wall, there is a lot of wasted space behind furniture. I imagine that a dome has similar problems.
I’d never build one. Most of our stuff is square. It does not fit well into a sphere. I doubt they are cheaper, insulation and heating has come a long way in the last 20 years.
Our neighbors built a round house. Or 16 sided or something. It’s kind of neat, but a lot of space seems to be wasted.
Nothing seems to fit. OK for the vacation home that it is, but they have very little storage.
I only know about Geodomes from magazines and such.
There is a lady around here that lives in an underground round house.
It is very cool (literally and figuratively) but the problem she has (she bought it off her BIL) is that decorating for a round room is a massive problem. Bedframes and shelves and whatnot. So much so that she is planning on building a house atop her underground house and renting out the bottom.
I don’t know if this would be a critical factor or not in a geo dome, but I thought I would mention it.
In the late 60s I lived a community of g-domes in Southern Colorado (all right, all right, it was a hippy commune). Bucky Fuller even came to visit us once while I was there.
Every positive thing that has been said about the dome is correct. Strong, efficient, eco friendly and relatively cheap to build. But in the year I was there I was never truly comfortable. As someone mentioned earlier, the sound thing always weirded me out - it wasn’t so much an echo as a shadow sound, sort of.
Furniture was something of problem too. If you put standard furniture in, the curve of the building always created gaps at the bottom. If you built specifically for the building the top areas were very small. Chairs would always have to be repositioned as taller people sat in them.
In a way it was kind of clostrophobic for me. I mean I knew intellectually that I had plenty of space but physically my feet would have plenty of room but the higher the building went the closer it came to my face.
I guess I am just a right angle type of guy or something.
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I will also mention that we had some problems with leaks in during rain and snow storms but I believe those problems have for the most part been overcome in the past almost 40 years.
