After searching the countryside for a year, Theresa and Richard Wisner had finally found their little piece of paradise, property so rural no one could tell them for certain which town it was in. Now, it was time to decide on a dwelling. They considered cob construction, but it was too much work. They looked at hay bale but feared it wouldn’t withstand the wet Oregon Coast Range climate. And manufactured homes simply held no appeal. When Richard suggested they consider a monolithic dome, Theresa recalls, “I was like, ‘I don’t think so.’”
But Richard was sold on the idea and eventually Theresa came around, too — but soon found herself regretting it. What had they done?
Whatever it was, it was much too late to back out. Which was not a pleasant thought on that day when, midway through construction, Theresa and Richard stepped inside.
“They had put the concrete in the dome and hadn’t yet taken away the window and door space,” Theresa said. “Walking in, it’s a gray concrete orb and it was pretty distressing. It was a cave and I was so like, ‘Oh my god, what have we done?’ We’d basically put everything in. We had eight acres we bought for it. We were fully invested.”
It was not as if the pair had not done their homework. Richard’s sister built a monolithic dome in Belize, and the Wisners had made up a road trip to Yelm, Washington to look at another. They studied the pros and cons, the maintenance requirements and the construction technique.
“It’s kind of an interesting process,” Theresa said. “They blow up basically a balloon and put pressurized air in it. Then they blow in a polyurethane foam and then they put rebar inside of that and then they blow concrete inside the rebar.”
They learned about the difference between a monolithic dome, which is essentially one piece; and a geodesic dome, which is built from a series of panels. The former is considered more stable in rough conditions, like the big wind experienced in the Coast Range. That stability along with the low maintenance, energy efficiency and the unique nature of the dwelling convinced the pair a dome was the home for them. It would be a cozy, comfortable kind of place. Or so Theresa thought.
The 1,100-square-foot dome arrived via UPS in a box. It took contractors little more than two weeks to raise the dome, install more than one mile of rebar, and six inches each of insulation and concrete.
And that was the cave the Wisners found themselves inside of midway through the project.
“When they were blew up the outer polyurethane shell, it looked really big, but by the time they put the concrete in, the color changed. There was no light coming in anywhere. I thought, ‘This is tiny. It’s a cave. I hate it.’”
But in days, builders opened the windows and doors, filling the dome with light, and suddenly it wasn’t so tiny. But the trials were far from over.
Once the floors were poured, the couple sprayed the inside in a paint color with a name — Exciting Orange — that Theresa hated, but one she hoped would complement the brick red floors.
“When we were done, I came back in, looked around and started crying,” she says. “I said, ‘I have to live inside the Great Pumpkin.’ That moment was pretty horrifying.”
But once Richard installed the interior walls, crafted from 8,000 board feet of lumber from their own land, suddenly that expanse of Exciting Orange was just a little less electrifying.
“It broke it up, it worked perfectly,” Theresa said. “I love it now.”
Today, the little dome is a warm, inviting space filled with light, antiques and old mementos from their families’ deep Oregon roots.
The solar system feeds into the electrical grid, eliminating electric bills five months of the year. There’s a temperate rainforest just outside the dome’s front door where a pair of goats provide entertainment and deer nibble on dandelion heads. And it’s so quiet, cars pull into the driveway, but they never know they have company until they hear the knock at the door.
Nonetheless, the house still feels like a cave, says Theresa. That is, in the best possible way.
“It’s comforting,” she said. “Walking into that house more than any other house I’ve ever lived in is comforting. You are almost caressed by the atmosphere.”
Comments are closed.