Charles Brath’s Colorado dream home was a concrete structure that would protect him from the prairie winds and anything else kicked up by Mother Nature.His dream became a reality when he discovered the monolithic dome.The monolithic dome met all the criteria for what Brath imagined for a building on his 40-acre property in Ellicott. He attended one of Texas-based Monolithic Constructors Inc.’s weeklong workshops and returned to Colorado with enough information to begin construction.For almost four years, Brath lived in a mobile home and worked on the dome on weekends – mostly by himself, he said. Brath subcontracted the electrical and plumbing.The finished product is a double-dome structure totaling 1,700 square feet with three bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen, living and dining room. The interior is well-lit by conventional square windows and circular skylights. What sets the dome apart physically, aside from the exterior design, are the rounded walls and the sense of being inside a giant igloo.Brath chose synthetic stucco for the exterior of the structure to give it an adobe-like finish. Although the dome is one-of-a-kind among a scattering of half-million-dollar homes and modulars, each nestled on significant acreage, Brath’s neighbors have embraced his citadel.Brath is happy with the air-tight quality of the structure and the energy savings.”The temperature in each room is consistent,” he said. “You can tell its air-tight if the dryer is on and you open the door. You get a good puff of air coming in.”The dome has an in-floor heating system powered by propane.”When I was living in the mobile home, I used 500 gallons of propane a year,” Brath said. “I have twice the space now, and I still use only 500 gallons of propane, and that amount also heats the hot-water tank. This is definitely better than a stick house – it’s airtight.”Although Colorado is obviously not hurricane-prone, Brath recalled a tornado that clobbered Ellicott High School a few years ago.”It went right over my head in the trailer,” he said. With his new dome home, Brath is no longer worried about anything as minor as a tornado.Charles Keyes, a structural engineer with Martin/Martin, an engineering consulting firm in Denver, can attest to the durability of the monolithic dome’s shape.Keyes was involved with building a dome in Denver.”The strength is in the shape and that the structure is continuous to the foundation,” Keyes said. Although he added that, in a high-wind situation, concrete has an advantage over other building materials because it is heavier and would take a greater force to lift.
