#HTE

Would Living in a Round House Be Awesome, or Would It Suck?

So like the rest of you, I’m distracting myself from worst-case COVID-19 scenarios. My latest mental escape of choice is looking at photos of dome houses, which look cool as hell.

Well, of course they always look good in photos–a professional photographer could’ve made my first Brooklyn apartment look good. But when I start looking at floorplans of round houses, I’m thinking that living in them would actually suck.

In these panicked times, there is no room for nuance, grey area or anything but total allegiance to one of two extreme viewpoints. You must decide whether living in a circle would be Awesome or would Totally Suck. Here is a sampling of floorplans to help you decide.

Minuses:

- Visual discord at trying to reconcile rectilinear furniture with curved walls, and/or weird trapezoid-shaped rooms

- Wasted space where rectilinear furniture meets curved surface

- Can pay for built-in furniture to meet curves, but that gets pricey

- DIY'ing built-in furniture to meet curves will require tons of scribing

- Unusable space where walls meet floor at weird angle

It looks like you have to build a big-ass circle, one so large in footprint that you essentially flatten the curve (sorry to use that phrase) of the wall, before the issue of rectilinear furniture in a curved space starts to go away.

Pluses:

- Round shapes better disperse hurricane-force winds

- More efficient to heat if you have a central fireplace

- Your house will become a landmark used by neighbors giving directions (“You’re gonna pass this weird round house, then take the next left”)

Anyways, your verdict: Yea or Nay?