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So like the rest of you, I'm distracting myself from worst-case COVID-19 scenarios. My latest mental escape of choice is looking at photos of dome houses, which look cool as hell.
Well, of course they always look good in photos--a professional photographer could've made my first Brooklyn apartment look good. But when I start looking at floorplans of round houses, I'm thinking that living in them would actually suck.
In these panicked times, there is no room for nuance, grey area or anything but total allegiance to one of two extreme viewpoints. You must decide whether living in a circle would be Awesome or would Totally Suck. Here is a sampling of floorplans to help you decide.
- Visual discord as a result of trying to reconcile rectilinear furniture with curved walls, and/or weird trapezoid-shaped rooms
- Wasted space where rectilinear furniture meets curved surface
- Can pay for built-in furniture to meet curves, but that gets pricey
- DIY'ing built-in furniture to meet curves will require tons of scribing and difficult-to-nail curve cutting
- Unusable space where walls meet floor at weird angle
It looks like you have to build a big-ass circle, one so large in footprint that you essentially flatten the curve (sorry to use that phrase) of the wall, before the issue of rectilinear furniture in a curved space starts to go away.
- Round shapes better disperse hurricane-force winds
- More efficient to heat if you have a central fireplace
- Your house will become a landmark used by neighbors giving directions ("You're gonna pass this weird round house, then take the next left")
Anyways, your verdict: Yea or Nay?
I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.
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Would Living in a Round House Be Awesome, or Would It Suck?
I want to see photos of builds of some of those floor plans with the central courtyards!
Ever since I first considered moving to Florida I grappled with the concept of designing a dwelling which would not only be resilient to the common problems of environmental degradation as well as critter and insect attacks, but also resilient to the extreme weather conditions Florida has to offer.
It depends on how you define 'round'. Igloos are dome-shaped. Yurts have a round footprint but vertical walls and a central peak. Of course you could ask the people at Deltec Homes: https://www.deltechomes.com/ or Mandala Design: https://www.mandalahomes.com/
If it looks like Living with the Lands, that would be awsome. https://www.farmflavor.com/florida/walt-disney-world-farm-grows-magical-produce-earth/
It would be fun to *STAY* in one (short term AirBNB for instance). It would suck to *LIVE* in one. While some of the floor plans are intriguing, it's just not an efficient design for living in.
It would be awful, because it does the opposite of what an airy, high-ceiling evokes. Even if you had a 12 foot ceiling but it’s rounded, the “collapsing” effect makes it feel like a seven foot ceiling.