Site Prep

We started clearing the site over the winter of 1997/1998, cutting about fifteen trees and stacking the firewood. And then re-stacking it and re-stacking it again, and probably once more, as we had a knack for putting it exactly where we'd soon need to place a trailer or large piece of equipment.

The heaviest equipment was a track-hoe that carved a notch into the mountain to give us a building pad.

Even that wasn't sufficient when we hit granite, and we had to bring in a rock breaker to clean things up enough for the footer. $250/hour for that one!

Creating the Design

Though I had always wanted to design and build a house, and had a fair amount of experience with construction, caution led us to seek out architects. None we spoke with, however, seemed to understand both our determination to build an insulated thin shell concrete house and our fondness for avant-garde architecture. 

While looking for an appropriate designer, we did the legwork to map the contours of the site, learn the local requirements, and understand the capabilities and limitations of this building style. By then we had developed our own design and were so fond of it that we committed to that direction. 

Our design was extreme in several aspects, and we worked closely with David South, Gary Clark, and David Collins at MDI, and with Dr. Arnold Wilson on the engineering to solve all of the unique challenges of a six-segment, over-center concrete shell perched on the edge of a mountain and bermed 18'. The final design covered 86' x 46' x 37', plus a 1000 sf multi-level covered porch.

Though the raw dimensions created some exterior drama, it was the interior that most excited us, because that's the part we'd experience all day and night. The intent from the start was a great room that highlighted the grand view. All other rooms opened onto that one so that they could share the view and the light from the 30' x 16' window wall, which itself was flanked by a 25' tall stone fireplace.

Why Asheville?

We knew we wanted to move from PA, but we still had to pick to where we wanted to move. Melanie wanted anywhere in the South, and I was just a bit more restrictive, limiting it to Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia.

We spent the month of May, 1997 visiting every medium and large city in those four states. Asheville won us over by a large amount because of the beauty of the mountains and the attitudes of the people.

Even though we wanted to build a house, and a concrete dome in particular, we spent quite a bit of time looking at existing houses to see if we could find what we wanted with less effort than building. We couldn't find anything that completely suited us, but we did find a perfect piece of land.

The views from the site were extraordinary, and we were naive enough at the time to not really understand that views come with elevation, and elevation creates many construction challenges. These unfolded over time, but at the beginning we were smitten with the views and the dream of building a house and moving to North Carolina.

Why a dome?

Melanie and I were living in Pennsylvania in 1997, but that was just a temporary location. We had intended from the start to move south and build a house. One day I was browsing around the internet for atypical house styles and came upon a picture of "Eye of the Storm". I was immediately hooked. I yelled for Melanie to look at the picture, and as soon as she did, she went to her photo album and pulled out a photo of when she'd been by the house--and been fascinated by the house--just a few years earlier. That's how quickly we made the decision to go in this direction.