Back in the distant ‘70s, up in the foothills above my family’s suburban tract home, you could discern the fine line of demarcation where the small, subdivided parcels quickly progressed from squarefeet to acres and cookie-cutter boxes to custom-built estates. Doctors in Tudor mansions next to lawyers in sprawling Ranch houses and Cape-Cod gabled manors sharing wide, tidy streets with Tuscan villas. Basically, it was a gated community without the gates. Whenever a lowland commoner like me ventured into the refined air of “The Estates,” the uneasy feeling of being watched was confirmed when the Westec security car followed my rusty Ford Pinto back down the hill.
So imagine my glee when a newly-minted computer millionaire replete with ponytail, tie-dyed shirt and old pickup purchased an empty parcel right in the middle of The Estates and began to build a huge domed eco-compound that looked like a cross between a Zuni Indian village and Fred Flintstone’s house. As you can imagine, the reaction of the blue-bloods was to raise holy hell, sighting everything from zoning laws and real estate values to Satan worship.
But alas, it was too late; the main structures were up and occupied before the ink on the first petition was dry. Hippies, dogs, lowlanders like myself, and various other strays now had a “dome away from home” right in the middle of the well-heeled gentry, and my friends and I soon learned brand-new words like “organic gardening,” “tofu” and “Shiva.”
Build Your Own Eco-Dome
If you’ve always wanted to go off the grid and thumb your nose at society like my ponytailed guru, but you’ve been shackled with a conventional home and not much space to build, take heart, fellow traveler! Here’s a chance to scale down your counter-culture dream home and still piss off your neighbors by building a small, efficient, 400-square foot Eco-Dome on a relatively small patch of homestead. The kind folks at Cal-Earth even offer workshops and tutorials to teach you how to build your own eco-home.
Using a simple plan utilizing earth-filled “Superadobe” coils, you and three or four of your comrades can easily build a small main dome with four “niches” that can function as a small guest home or studio apartment. Use the main dome as a living room and the niches as an entrance hall, kitchen and bathroom, or convert the whole structure into something the website calls a “Bed-womb,” which I’m not sure I want to know about.
Once built, you can leave as is, or make it the first step in a cluster design of connecting vaults and domes that could lead to a backyard commune, a divorce, banishment from the Homeowners Association or all of the above. But remember, take it slow, because to paraphrase the old adage…Dome wasn’t built in a day.