This month Moomin and I went for a weekend trip to stay in a geodesic dome at Oz Farms with Oblomovka and his daughter, and Yatima and her family. I spent most of the weekend in bed looking out from the huge glass windows of the wooden dome or sitting on the deck with a view of a hay field and a hilly redwood forest. The kids played in the creek and ran wild in the woods. No one got poison oak.
You can see the huge windows here & the beauty of their construction. I lay in bed a lot looking out the windows at the trees and fields and the soaring domed roof. The two domes are stuck together and share a bathroom and big kitchen with lots of equipment. There was a wood stove in each dome & a big pile of firewood on the deck outside, where we watched the stars from family sized lounge chairs.
The farm and domes were built in the mid-70s as part of a communal farm and utopian community. It was called The Village or Village Oz and was one of hundreds of back to the land efforts. Lawrence Kroll has a few pages of photos of the dome construction and Oz life.
At some point the farm was sold. It is a working organic farm now with apples as its main crop but also a variety of veggies & fruit that are sold through CSAs. The cabins, yurts, and domes all around the valley and its little forests & fields are available for people to rent. So it’s a farm with one foot in the tourist industry so that city slickers like us can fool around in the woods & the Garcia River for a weekend. The kids had a great time roaming free in the forest while the grownups appreciated the beds, kitchen, and indoor plumbing (there was a jacuzzi!)
I would not call this place accessible by any stretch of the imagination but I managed to get in there and park myself.
The details of the wooden domes were very beautiful. I read up after I got back home on dome construction. It seems the roof of a dome often leaks and there is a small industry of expert roofers and carpenters who restore vintage 70s zonohedra to fix the roof leaks and skylights. I’ll keep that in mind for when I start my cult in the woods…
We got to see the golden hayfields and dusty live-oak-green up close & personal and the cathedralish redwoods plus a sunny pebbled stream safe for kids to play in. It was a nice vacation and I’m going to write up all the fun things we did! I think it was amazing and worth it just to sleep in a geodesic dome – and for the kids to have the memories of doing that.
In retrospect: I wonder if we were right on top of the San Andreas Fault?
