Arcadia Dome Home

Snow covers the Monolithic Dome home.

The snow-covered home sits on a curved road heading to Providence Canyon. The lower walls appear separate from the multi-domed roof above, but it is actually a single, seamless Monolithic Dome structure.

Dave South / Monolithic Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Arcadia Dome Home is an Orion-style Monolithic Dome home in Providence, Utah. Constructed in 2016, it is the home of MDI Publisher Dave South and his family. The home merges three dome shapes into one seamless structure using a prototype transverse Airform membrane for construction.

Ostensively, it’s named “Arcadia” to mean a pastoral utopia, but in reality, the family are big fans of Doctor Who and named it for a domed city on the fictional planet of Gallifrey. The home is situated on the south bench in Providence with a view of Cache Valley and the Wellsville Mountains to the west with several mountain peaks to the east.

The 3,200 square foot (300 m²) home has four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, a kitchen, great room, dining area, sunroom, den, utility room, pantry, dry food storage, mud room, two-car garage, and a large loft upstairs. A curved balcony overlooks the great room below.

The dome shapes are roughly 32-feet (9.75 m) to 45-feet (13.7 m) to 32-feet (9.75 m) diameter domes atop a segmented stem wall. The stem wall was created by standing up plywood forms and spraying one side with shotcrete. A single Airform membrane designed to swoop from shape to shape was attached to the top of the stem wall. The whole structure was pressurized. Polyurethane foam was applied, steel reinforcing rebar hung, and four inches (10 cm) of shotcrete was applied in layers to complete the structure. The finished shell looks like a wall with a dome roof, but it is actually a single, monolithic structure.

Read Arcadia—Our new Monolithic Dome home for more information on the process of buying land and designing the structure. Shell complete for Arcadia Monolithic Dome home reports on the construction process from foundation to shell completion. The open house on November 5, 2016, yielded a 31-slide photo album.

Panoramic view from the main entrance.

A panoramic view from the main entrance includes the curved staircase to the loft where the balcony overlooks the great room, kitchen, and dining area below.

Brad Petersen / Lifestyle Homes