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The Appraisal

The House May Spin, but the Owners Find It’s Hard to Move

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A House Is a Spinning Dome

It takes only a motor the size of a lawn mower with the strength of a blow dryer to rotate a 2,500-square-foot house in New Paltz, N.Y.

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It takes only a motor the size of a lawn mower with the strength of a blow dryer to rotate a 2,500-square-foot house in New Paltz, N.Y.CreditCredit...Emma Tannenbaum for The New York Times

NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — Having sat in one too many hot cars in his life, Shiva Vencat decided on the kind of vacation home he would build here 15 years ago, up a winding road at the foot of the Shawangunk Mountains.

“You leave your car in the sun, it becomes a furnace,” Mr. Vencat said in a phone interview from France. “So what do people do? They move it to the shade. You can’t do that with your home. Or so I thought.”

In the mid-1990s, Mr. Vencat, a Manhattan commodities investor, was on another business trip in France when he read about a remarkable home in Brittany.

It was a 14-foot-wide dome made of curved wooden beams, a cross between a giant paper lantern and an igloo. Built in a Czech factory, the home was earthquake and hurricane resistant as well as energy efficient. But what interested Mr. Vencat most was a feature even more unusual than the shape: The home could spin.

“I thought the idea that you could take advantage of the weather, of the seasons, even throughout the day, was incredible,” Mr. Vencat said. “It became an obsession for me.”

It takes only a motor the size of a lawn mower with the strength of a blow dryer to rotate Mr. Vencat’s 2,500-square-foot house. If only it were that easy finding someone to buy it.

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Veronique Gautier-Vencat inside the Domespace home in New Paltz, N.Y. The home went on the market four years ago for $1.2 million, and has since dropped to $975,000.Credit...Emma Tannenbaum for The New York Times

The property has turned lots of heads since it was first listed four years ago for $1.2 million, but no one seems to want a carousel cottage. It is now with its third broker, John Samios of Douglas Elliman, and the price has dropped to $975,000.

“It just envelops you; it’s like a cocoon,” said Veronique Gautier-Vencat, Mr. Vencat’s wife and a branding executive who designed the interior. “But I think it can be hard for people to break out from the way they have been living.”

For more than a decade, Mr. Vencat and the home’s inventor, Patrick Marcilli, have been trying to promote additional models in the United States, viewing the dome as the home of the future.

There are roughly 200 such homes, called Domespace, in France and an additional two dozen around the world. As an architectural movement, though, the spinning dome house has hit a wall.

“I thought America is the land of pioneers, but apparently not,” Mr. Marcilli said.

One problem is that it can be hard to get local inspectors and contractors to support the idea. But also a spinning dome, as well as the slightly less playful stationary version, can feel like something out of “The Jetsons.”

The dream of living in mass-produced, energy-efficient, affordable domes dates at least to the visionary thinking of the architect Buckminster Fuller in the 1950s.

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“People really do behave differently in the round space,” said Ms. Gautier-Vencat, inside her dome house.Credit...Emma Tannenbaum for The New York Times

In the 1960s and ’70s, particularly spurred by the energy crisis, Fuller’s geodesic designs gained some popularity. With lightweight construction that promoted better airflow and insulation, domes began popping up in suburban tracts, on farms, even as the centerpiece of Epcot at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla. Yet for a design that is essentially global, it has never gained much acceptance in this world full of squares.

Mr. Marcilli came up with the idea for a rotating home by accident. A high school teacher at the time, he built his first round home for himself in 1988 in the Breton town of Scaër, not far from where Ms. Gautier-Vencat grew up. After a flurry of press, he began receiving requests for homes, and Domespaces began popping up around him.

He realized that the easiest way to assemble the homes’ dozen or more axis beams, which balance on hundreds of ball bearings, was for the homes to move rather than the construction workers.

One buyer saw the house moving and decided to keep it that way. Now, roughly half of the completed Domespaces rotate.

Those in the dome home industry, if it can be called that, believe now should be their time, with resources growing scarcer and the climate fiercer. “We see a pretty big market in Florida, California, maybe even Long Island, after Sandy,” said David Fanchon, who started North American distribution of Domespace in 2007.

The Vencats learned quickly just how tough building a circular home can be. Theirs took nearly four years.

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The support beams double as a design feature in the round house.Credit...Emma Tannenbaum for The New York Times

That was partly because they could supervise work only on the weekends, but also because the work was so unconventional. It took months to find an architect, an engineer and a contractor who were comfortable with the design and months more to convince local inspectors that the design was sound.

Workers were always complaining about having to curve walls and fixtures, and almost everything was custom, from the trapezoidal windows to the Guggenheim-inspired spiral staircase. The 8.3-meter Domespace kit cost about $250,000 and the Vencats spent an equal amount on the interior, plus more for the 28 acres it sits on.

The biggest challenge, then and now, was financial. Just as the foundation was being finished, the bank rejected the Vencats’ loan. They eventually found a loan through a credit union, but prospective buyers now are having the same trouble.

“Unless you fall into the right box,” Mr. Vencat said, “it doesn’t work.”

The situation for dome houses has grown more acute, thanks to one notorious housing bubble.

David B. South, head of the Monolithic Dome Institute and a builder of dome houses, schools and athletic facilities of his own design, said his Texas-based company was erecting as many as 100 homes a year until regulations like the Dodd-Frank Act took effect, forcing banks to look harder at the marketability of the homes they were underwriting. “Now it’s eight to 10 a year if we’re lucky,” Mr. South said.

“It’s all Congress’s fault,” he said. “A man should be able to build whatever home he wants and can afford.”

For the time being, the Vencats are renting the home as a vacation getaway for $800 for a summer weekend. Though renters are not allowed to rotate the home, the Vencats are hoping one of them might buy into the movement permanently.

“People really do behave differently in the round space,” Ms. Gautier-Vencat said. “It’s just free. It’s free-flowing, free of walls, free of constraints. It’s a space, versus a room, versus a box. There’s no limitation.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: The House May Spin, but the Owners Find It’s Hard to Move. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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