Few in this life earn the right to brag that they’ve turned a pipe dream into waking reality. But among them is one Anastasiya Dudik, who recently built a dome-shaped home near Joshua Tree that she first envisioned years ago. In 2014, new to Los Angeles and working at a tech start-up, Anastasiya visited the desert for the first time and immediately got the bug to build. Almost weekly, she visited the area. “I would camp and drag my friends out in the middle of a heat wave,” she says. “I had all these printouts of land for sale with no addresses and I would just go explore.”

Things got real in 2021 when Anastasiya purchased a lot in Pioneertown. Her design experience only included one semester as an architecture major, but, inspired by organic architecture—ranging from the work of Anton Gaudí to the Green School in Bali—began building an otherworldly retreat overlooking the Sawtooths, a small mountain range on the south side of town. Here, Dudik shares how her vision for a dome in the desert came together, one visit after the next.

A California Hata

I’m originally from Ukraine, and there you have your city house and then you have your hata, which is your weekend getaway. When I was growing up, every weekend my family would visit ours. When I moved to Los Angeles, Joshua Tree was my hata, in a way.

This project came about with me falling in love with Joshua Tree. The first time I visited the desert, I had this clear vision that a dome I had been wanting to build belonged in this otherworldly landscape. I started obsessing over it and driving out any weekend I could.

Building the Dome

The only domes I really knew about were geodesic, but then I started looking into it. When I found monolithic domes, I was like, well, this is it. I visited a few, and they’re actually a lot different than what I created. People kind of stick a house inside a dome. I really wanted to celebrate the true shape inside, so when you walk in, you see the full dome. To build mine, I worked with Monolithic, which is run by a family out of Texas.

The ring beam footing around the dome and the shell went up in two to three weeks. After you finalize the design, the company creates an air form, a kind of bubble, by blowing up a polyurethane membrane. During construction, there’s a two-door system that you walk through to enter the dome. It has to stay inflated for the whole construction period while you work from the inside. The construction team inflates the bubble, sprays foam insulation, adds rebar, and then sprays shotcrete. I did hand stucco on both the inside and outside for the aesthetic, which makes the dome fireproof as well.

Resilient by Design

A lot of doomsday preppers like to build monolithic domes because they hold up to any natural disaster: They’re really good against wind, fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes. The design is passive, too, because it’s a thick layer of concrete. You spend a lot less on heating and cooling because the concrete holds the temperature.

Creating the Layout

It was definitely a challenge of the imagination. Conceptually I split the dome in a half. The first half is the living room, and the back half is bedrooms and bathrooms. At its tallest point the ceiling is 16 feet. When we were building, I was nervous the bedrooms and bathrooms would feel siloed. But it ended up feeling great. The ceilings are really tall, but you still see the dome’s true shape in the bedrooms and bathrooms. There’s a circular window in every room, so you have that otherworldly feel.

Decorating the Dome

I realized that I couldn’t just go and buy furniture since the dome itself feels so raw and handmade. Basically all the furniture and decor is custom. A lot of the pieces are actually made from boulders, including the dining room table. There’s a mirror in the guest room that’s held between two boulders. There are boulders in the shower. We border a mountain that is full of them, so I wanted to make it feel like they were rolled into the house.

Roger Hopkins is an amazing rock sculptor in the lower desert, and he has a big stone yard. You go out and climb all these boulders, and then you pick out the one you want. Anything you want, he figures out how to make it. He made all of those furniture pieces.

I picked a few materials to celebrate: African mahogany wood, stainless steel, and stone. The kitchen island is stainless steel. I made a custom bed frame out of stainless steel, too, and the other bed frames out of mahogany.

An Homage to Home

I shared my dream of a hata with my grandpa, too. He passed during the pandemic. He had such a beautiful spirit in our village house, so I wanted to make sure lived on in the Joshua Tree house. The dome is a little celebration to him.

More Construction Diary stories:

In the Mojave Desert, a First-Time Builder Takes On a Tricky Prefab Home

At Sea Ranch, a Couple Build a “Forever Moving” Home Made to Change With Them

Project Credits:

Interior and Landscape Design: Anastasiya Dudik

Dome Construction: Monolithic

Photographer: Natasha Lee / @talktonatasha

Photographer: Shannon Moss / @shanmoss

Photographer: Brandon Stanley / @bstanley_photo

Appears In

Construction Diary: She Envisioned a Dome Home—Then Made It a Reality Outside Joshua Tree