Under the title “Round Home Moored to a Hill,” Life magazine dedicated six pages to a Boulder, Colorado house designed by architect Charles Haertling in 1964. Neighbors had previously voiced vehement opposition to the house, sending a letter of protest during its construction that complained of the house’s “sheer grossness” and predicted “a definite though incalculable loss of property values.”
After the house was built, Life relates, “most of the neighbors apologized.”
The owners “wound up with a round house partly because their architect, Charles Haertling, is an imaginative man but more because — as they found to their surprise — they could get more space for their money in a round house than in a square one.”
I doubt very much that the owners of the round house “could get more space for their money in a round house than in a square one.” I designed, built, and own, a round house. We love our house, but the notion that round is lower cost is simply not true. Many of the products built for houses are planar in form, or designed to be installed in a house with plane walls. The fact that the wall circumference is a bit less in a round house than in a square house for the same floor area has a very trivial impact on the total cost, and does not begin to offset the added costs of creating a round structure.