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Credit: Matthew Truman Photography
This “monolithic dome house” in Kalamazoo County’s Oshtemo Township is listed for $1.9 million.
A dome-shaped house for sale near Kalamazoo has been likened to a cluster of igloos, a batch of cinnamon rolls, a bunch of onions or a UFO since it went viral last month. But for the engineer behind the home’s creation, the structure served as an attempt to solve a puzzle.
Broker Fred Taber, of Portage-based Jaqua Realtors, listed what he described as a “monolithic dome home” in Kalamazoo County’s Oshtemo Township on June 4 for $1.9 million. He’s representing sellers William and Linda Barnes, the home’s third set of owners who bought it in 1991 and have lived there ever since.
The three-bedroom, four-bathroom home consists of seven connected domes that together span 6,347 square feet on three different levels.
The walkout “basement” level contains the main entryway, utility room, garage access, a half-bathroom, storage and an entertainment room.
A central staircase leads guests to the second level, which contains the main common areas, including a kitchen, two living rooms, the master suite, a laundry room and 2.5 baths. Going up another level on the same central staircase, there’s one more open-plan bedroom under the uppermost dome.
Built for and largely designed by Dr. Luther Bruce in 1977, the unusually shaped home went viral in mid-June on real estate websites Zillow Gone Wild, Realtor.com and Pricey Pads and was picked up by CBS News and the New York Post.
Reached by phone this week at his home in Phoenix, Bruce told Crain’s Grand Rapids Business the original idea for the dome house came from a University of Michigan architectural student who showed him a sketch one day.
“He showed me an elevation plan that he had drawn, and he said, ‘Do you think you could build that?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ And so I did quite a bit of research and … (completed) the drawings and so forth from there,” Bruce said. “I didn’t change any of (his original design), I just figured out how to do it.”
Now in his 80s, Bruce is something of a polymath who’s followed his curiosity into different career paths. He started out as a mechanical engineer, then shifted to chemical engineering, then became a polymer chemist and, in mid-life, went to dental school followed by a specialty in orthodontics at the UM.
Kitchen and dining area. Credit: Matthew Truman Photography.
He spent the past several decades of his career splitting his time between working as an orthodontist and taking on side projects in research, engineering and building houses.
In the mid-1970s, when Bruce met the young architectural student with the idea for the dome house, he was drawn to the project out of a desire to prove it could be done, as opposed to the beauty of the design.
“I just was doing different things that caught my eye (at the time), and it attracted me that I didn’t know if it could be built or not,” he said. “I’m just a guy, in my own mind, that’s totally average, and anyone could do what I did if they happened to be in the right place.”
Bruce said the young man, whose name he declined to share, gave him the plans and his blessing to build the house. It was just an exterior sketch, with no detailed plans for the utilities, plumbing, electrical or structural materials, as the student lacked those skills at the time. Three years later, when the project was done, Bruce sent him photos of the completed job, but then they lost touch.
Drone view. Credit: Matthew Truman Photography.
Bruce eschewed the idea of building a geodesic dome made up of interconnected triangles, which was the design used to construct the EPCOT Center dome at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla.
He also didn’t want to build a dome of mesh-covered rebar coated in gunite (sprayed concrete), which is what a lot of “relatively smooth” domes in the 1970s were being made of, he said.
Instead, Bruce traveled the world and gathered other ideas for about a year before he was confident he could build the dome house. He sealed the deal when he connected with a fiberglass expert from the former Lynema Enterprises who designed the iconic wavy roof of the city hall in Bronson, a small town about 50 miles southeast of Kalamazoo in Branch County. That project won an award from the state of Michigan.
“I’d been a polymer chemist, so I was drawn to this guy’s expertise, and he helped me quite a bit and showed me how to cast a dome part that big,” Bruce said.
Ultimately, the design Bruce devised in consultation with other engineers and builders was a system of seven domes consisting of a total of 42 fiberglass panels joined together. Each panel was supported by angled T-bar steel curved to fit the arc of the panel. The domes are set on concrete spherical “dishes” that are each 28 feet in diameter with a 14-foot radius. They’re cradled by a series of concrete fins under each dish to support the main floor joists.
“There was a reasonable amount of three-dimensional engineering that went into it,” Bruce said.
Bruce said he stopped by the house two or three years ago to check out how it looks today, and was pleased to see it’s still in such good condition. He said he’s extremely proud of the dome house as one of the top engineering feats in his career.
“I had a lot of help, and we did a lot of things that no one has ever seen before (to make it happen),” he said. “Now, 50 years later, it’s borne out.”
Bruce and his wife and two kids lived in the house for seven or eight years before pulling up stakes to move to Arizona.
“We immensely enjoyed the house,” he said, noting that it was energy efficient and cozy, perfect for a family. “The beauty of a house that’s a circle like that is that the whole thing lives like an 1,800- or 2,000-square-foot home. You’re always closer to the next room or rooms than you would be if (the house) was a big rectangle. Our whole family enjoyed it, and it worked out very well for us.”
Taber, the listing broker, carved a niche by marketing Frank Lloyd Wright homes in Kalamazoo County. His first three success stories going viral on Zillow Gone Wild were Usonian homes that Wright designed for the middle class in Galesburg and Kalamazoo.
He said he’s developed a rapport via email with Zillow Gone Wild creator Samir Mezrahi, so he wasn’t surprised when Mezrahi picked up the dome house.
“I knew it would because of the kind of house it is,” Taber said of the house garnering so much attention. “It’s kind of a local phenomenon. People who live out that way talk about it all the time. In fact, you can see it from the road.”
Unlike some of the previous properties he’s represented, the dome house is differentiated because “it doesn’t have a famous architect behind it.”
“It was just a doctor who had this idea, and that’s what he wanted,” Taber said.
So far, the broker said he’s fielded interest from two serious buyers for the dome house, but it remained available as of July 2.
Taber said the listing price is based on the size of the home, its unique design, its 5 acres of land and the work the sellers have put into it over the years in terms of maintenance and renovations. They’ve cladded the roof in metal, replaced heating, ventilation and cooling systems, redone the kitchen and bathrooms, updated aesthetics, added a deck and installed a koi pond.
The sellers “don’t want to sell,” but are now in their upper 70s and low 80s and need to downsize, he said.
“They really like the fact that it’s a unique home,” Taber said. “It’s very inviting and comfortable.”
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