Inside a Texas dome house that’s home to humans, not Hobbits
After shopping for a home in the Hondo area for a while, Mark and Susan Logrbrinck finally found something that checked all their boxes.
At least 10 acres? Check. A studio where Susan can do her fabric art? Check. A separate place for Mark’s mother to live? Check.
A domed house that looks like Patrick’s home in “SpongeBob SquarePants”? Well, not exactly a check, but three months after moving in, the couple has fallen in love with the bubblelike home they’ve dubbed the “Hondome.”
It was, in fact, Susan’s 11-year-old son Dylan who first saw the house online and told his mother she needed to go look at it.
“I’m an artist, and artists love interesting things,” said Susan, who lived in California for 20 years but has Texas roots. “It was a little bit more than we wanted to spend. But as we looked at it, all the things that we were looking for were already here, so we wouldn’t have to buy them.”
The home is decorated with a number of pieces purchased on consignment, including this shelving unit once used to hold produce in a grocery store.
Richard A. Marini /Staff
The couple, who married and moved in in February, know little about the home’s history other than that it’s about 20 years old. “Even the real estate agent couldn’t tell us who built it,” she said.
They do know that the home’s dome shape makes it extremely energy efficient. Their electric bills haven’t been much more than $100, which includes the home, Susan’s studio and Mark’s mom’s place. Part of that savings also comes from a small solar panel array that was also on the property when they bought it.
But they love the Hondome for more than just the energy savings.
“I like the uniqueness,” said Mark, a surveyor who was born and raised in Hondo. “I never marched to the beat of what’s considered normal. When I told a friend we’d bought a dome home, his reply was, ‘I expected no less.’ ”
The home is a monolithic dome, cast as a single piece, as compared to a geodesic dome which is made up of connecting triangles. The exterior is covered in sprayed cement, giving it a texture like stucco, and painted beige.
Several small dormer windows give the home a whimsical, fairy tale feel, as if a Hobbit were about to step outside and greet you. The impression is bolstered by the ribbed trim around the edge of the front entryway and embedded stones around the edge in the back, eccentricities added by a previous owners.
The inside of the Hondome appears much larger than it would seem from the outside, perhaps because the ground floor ceiling is largely open through to both the second floor and the 20-foot ceiling above.
Richard A. Marini /StaffInside, it’s like stepping into Doctor Who’s Tardis; the interior appears much larger than it would seem from the outside. This is perhaps because the ground floor ceiling is largely open through to both the second floor and the 20-foot ceiling above, giving the 2,600-square-foot, three-bedroom, three-bathroom home a surprising airiness.
“There’s something about it being so open inside that gives it a cozy feeling,” Susan said. “There aren’t many walls to separate us, and it just makes me feel like I’m tucked safely away with my family and our sweet pets in our own little homey paradise.”
Without an attic or basement, the air conditioning ducts also are in plain view, adding an industrial feel that somehow complements the often-rustic furnishings, including antiques such as a coffee table made from an old Mexican door and a shelving unit that used to hold produce in a grocery store. Susan bought many of these pieces at the Home Consignment Center on La Cantera Parkway.
When the couple bought the dome, most of the interior was painted the same beige as the exterior, a look that insulted Susan’s artistic sensibilities. So they started painting the walls in shades of red, blue and green.
The task wasn’t as simple as it sounds, however, thanks to the rough interior cement walls. “Yeah, the texture made it a real pain in the butt to paint,” Susan said.
One of the only spots not painted beige was the top of the dome, which was a dark blue, like the early evening sky.
“I thought it was too blue,” Susan said. “But after painting over the rest of the khaki interior, it didn’t look so bad. But eventually I want to paint it the same pale blue we have elsewhere, so it’ll feel very airy and open and sky-ish.”
The kitchen is also surprisingly large, in part because the rounded walls create more space between the square island at the center of the room and the counter tops, which follow the curve of the outside wall.
While they haven’t done much to the kitchen yet, Susan said she plans to paint the lower cabinets a cream color for a more modern look. And while she laments that the way the walls curve inward as they rise makes it impossible to install upper cabinets, she notes that the home’s geometry, with all those straight interior walls meeting curved outside walls, creates plenty of orphan spaces that can be used for storage in the kitchen and elsewhere.
Also untouched so far is the master bedroom, which remains a beige-colored time capsule of what the house looked like when the couple moved in, including the linoleum sheet flooring.
The loftlike upstairs has been almost completely turned over to Dylan and his 7-year-old brother Seth. In addition to two bedrooms, a bathroom and a play area, there’s also a kid-friendly, not-so-secret passageway that runs from a closet at one end of the landing, behind the bathroom and into Dylan’s room.
Tigerlily sleeps on the sectional sofa on the ground floor, which has a view of the second floor through a loft-like opening in the ceiling.
Jerry Lara /Staff photographer“The cat seems to like going back there, too,” said Susan.
The home’s openness combined with its dome shape could make things pretty noisy, so they’ve placed plenty of area rugs throughout to muffle the sound. One of Susan’s rare complaints is that the dome’s windows are so small that they don’t let in a lot of natural light.
“It hasn’t bothered me as much as I thought it would,” she said. “You’re in Texas and you’re out in the sun all the time. And then you come in and it just feels nice and comfortable.”
Another item checked off.
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