Fortunately there is a cost-effective solution: the dome home. Ever heard about how strong an egg is for its size and materials? It's amazing the stress you can put on an egg without breaking it, and that's because the egg is so round. Any force applied to the surface of the egg gets distributed radially to other areas of the egg, and is therefore absorbed by the structure of the egg. Well, the same is true for dome homes. In fact, dome homes are so strong that they meet or exceed the FEMA Near-Absolute Protection Standards. That means that almost no practical structure has better storm resistance than a dome.
Because of the inherent storm resistance of the dome, I feel it is only a matter of time - and common sense - before its widespread acceptance in storm-ridden areas like the Southeast USA and Tornado Alley. In fact, I'm amazed at how adamantly people cling to their square home designs when they are so dramatically inferior regarding storm safety. The time has come for this to change.
Perhaps the best news regarding dome home acceptance is that modern dome homes do not cost any more than a regular home of the same square footage, yet they have significant advantages. The construction doesn't take any longer, the maintenance is about the same, they last longer, they cannot be destroyed by bugs, mold, or rot, and their energy efficiency is better than a regular square home by a factor of 50%. Just about the only two disadvantages are that some space is wasted when putting square furniture against a round wall, and the concern of resale value. The space utilization issue can be minimized with proper design, however the question of resale value is a concern. In my case, I'm either willing to take the possible hit at resale time or otherwise feel that dome home value will increase in areas like Florida, especially right after a hurricane. If you're going to put up a for sale sign on your dome home, do it right after a major storm - you may be surprised at the attention you get.
The particular home shown in the above rotating animation is an elliptical design with a huge great room and tall open loft area. With a spherical dome, having a large great room this size (20'x40') generally means using multiple domes connected together because the great room takes up so much of a 40' dome that only tiny rooms can exist on either side. That's why I was so happy when I called the Monolithic Dome Institute and learned that they can make elliptical domes - because the ellipse facilitates a large central room as well as large side rooms. Of course there are many possibilities with spherical domes as well including multiple domes, sunken domes, and multi-story domes but I was looking for something similar to a ranch home and I wasn't pleased with the shape of a multiple dome. I also didn't want a three story building, just one story + attic for me, thank you very much. So the ellipse works well in this case. In fact, the shape shown is a full 70 feet wide while being only 18 feet tall, so it approximates the shape of a traditional ranch home.
The reason that I need such a large great room relative to the size of the house is that I want to have living room and dining room together as is often the case, and also an office/lab/desk area in the same great room. This way I can be with the rest of the family while I am at my desk on the computer or doing hobby/inventing projects. Furthermore, I find that I work best with a huge desk area because of the multiple computers, printer, fax machine, oscilloscope, power supply, function generator multimeter, briefcases, solering irons, and lots of hand tools and parts that I use. So the great room must accommodate three full rooms in one, which it does nicely.
Attic Gameroom
One passion of mine is 1980's arcade games. I have a Ms. Pac-Man full-sized upright machine from the 1980's and before I had a Tempest upright machine as well. So I'm beginning to be an arcade game collector and I'd like to have a gameroom someday soon. So what I did with the house plan is I closed off the open loft area and created an attic. This allowed me to arrange a U-shaped collection of upright games which you can see in the above photo. The image perspective is from that of a person seated on a couch that I put up there in the 3D model, and you can see the sink and shelves of a wetbar right in front of the couch. Behind that are the stairs coming from the first floor, and in the center of the U are some tabletop 1980's arcade games and a planetarium that projects light dots onto the ceiling. By changing the sphere of the planetarium we change the theme of the gameroom, for example an asteroids projection theme would be nice. There is room for up to 21 games, but I will probably only put 17 games up there because Boxing and Pole Position are double-games and some tabletops like Donkey Kong are bigger than you think. Also I need to provide space for someone to walk to the area behind the games for cleaning and home storage purposes.
Audio Privacy
One thing I learned from a man who designed his own home was: put the kids on the other side of the home! So that's what I did with the ellipse home. On the left of the home as you enter the front door are two bedrooms and the kitchen, while the right has the master bedroom and both bathrooms. This way any noise that is made in the master bedroom does not travel to the kid's rooms, and vice versa. The only problem that I can see with the arrangement is that kids and/or guests must walk across the living room to get to their bathroon. Oh well, life is not perfect and it is a small price to pay for the sake of audio privacy.
Hallways
There are no hallways in this home design. That is a goal of mine in creating home plans with the greatest possible living space per square foot of house, to eliminate the hallways as much as possible. What I have ended up with is a simple rule: make all of the rooms open up into the great room. That way no hallways are required. Ah, but this is no panacea. There remains one problem: people need walkways within the great room to get from place to place in the home, so you sort of need what you might call virtual hallways or walking paths. The solution to this lies in the furniture arrangement. I considered various shapes for the desk area including double-L shape, broken O shape, and U shape, but what worked best in the end was double-I shape, or in other words two desks placed in parallel with the chair(s) in the middle. This way the path from both kid's bedrooms to the second bath is not blocked and walking into the home via the front door you are greeted with walking pathways rather than a desk barrier. Then, placing the dining room table running horizontally from left to right works best and finally couches arranged circularly around a TV on the wall between the master bedroom and master bath works well. This creates a full "O" walkway path around each of the three components of the great room, for an "OOO" virtual walkway design, providing almost unobstructed walking with no wasted hallways.
Cleaning Robots
I hate cleaning, especially floors. That's why I'm planning to use the Scooba robotic floor cleaner from iRobot (
www.irobot.com
) to clean the floors. They have their original Roomba robot for carpet cleaning, but I'm not a real fan of carpet and this house will be in sunny warm Florida so there is no reason to have carpet. Instead I'll have tile everywhere and use a scooba robot to do the cleaning. The only thing is that the tile must be selected properly so that it is smooth enough for scooba to navigate. Also there are a few places in the home where the robot could possibly get stuck. There are four pointy corners in the kid's bedrooms and bathrooms of the first floor, and also the entire perimiter of the second floor is a potential scooba trap. This problem is easily solved by the addition of some baseboards that close off the pointy areas. Besides, how could it be a futuristic home without a robot to clean it up?
Insurance
After the recent bout of hurricanes in 2005, insurance rates have skyrocketed. Many people cannot afford to insure their homes and must sell and begin renting an apartment. It's a shame to lose your house just because its square. Since domes are proven to be so stormworthy, a case can be made for lower insurance rates for dome home owners. In the event that you actually can get a discount this helps makes dome homes a cost effective alternative to square homes.
Construction
You can read all about monolithic dome construction at
www.monolithic.com
, but I will summarize the method here for you. The dome actually starts with an inflated baloon thing called an airform that is placed on a poured concrete slab foundation. That may sound strange, but its really an ingenious way to create a dome. Workers go inside the dome and spray on a layer of insulating polyurethane foam followed by another layer of foam, resulting in three inches of foam. This will serve as a very effective insulation layer and will also provide enough structural rigidity to support the rebar, which goes up next. Then layers of shotcrete, which is spray-on concrete, are applied until the rebar is covered and the concrete is three inches thick. Finally stucco provides a coating for the interior and exterior of the building. The stucco protects the foam, which insulates the home and the concrete provides the strength, while the inner layer of stucco finishes the interior.
Energy Efficiency
As mentioned above, the dome has a three inch outer layer of insulating foam. The foam itself has a high R-Value and there are no gaps in the foam where heat can pass. Also because the dome is spherical (or elliptical), it has very low surface area for enclosing a given volume of space. This creates a better thermal barrier because there is less surface area across which heat can transfer. Because of these factors a dome home will have half the heating and cooling cost of a regular square home. In the heat of Florida electric bills for houses are a significant part of the cost of living in the home, so the superior energy efficiency of the dome is very cost effective.
Conclusion
Today's monolithic dome home is a safe and cost effective alternative for people who live in storm ridden areas such as Florida. Shown and described in this article is an elliptical dome home design that offers a surprising amount of luxury for its square footage, and is also custom fit to the customer's lifestyle and living requirements. The elliptical shape offers aesthetic and architectural advantages that combine to create an excellent home design.