Life under ground

How would a modern-day Renaissance man -- a visionary who soars with birds in a self-built glider, who creates magnificent sculptures from found bits of rusty metal, and who can invent a tool for virtually any job -- choose to live?

You'd expect his home to reflect his love of the sky, and of natural beauty, and to display expressions of his prodigious creative talents.

And all that is true for the Lake Scugog home of artist, builder, writer and naturalist Bill Lishman.

The unexpected part, though, is that it's buried under the ground.

At first glance, the six-room subterranean dwelling inserted in a hilltop overlooking virgin forest and the sparkling blue lake resembles one of J.R.R. Tolkien's hobbit-holes or an elaborate molehill with skylights.

But it's not just a fantasia by an eccentric genius, who admits that even his friends tease him about developing tiny squinty eyes and whiskers.

"I really don't think human beings are made to live in boxes," says Mr. Lishman, settling into a beanbag chair in a circular room flooded with light from the sky and gently warmed by under-floor water pipes. "I think we have a natural instinct to live outside, if it wasn't for the weather and the bugs. And this gives you a feeling of being outside but you're inside."

Mr. Lishman has never been a man to think inside the box -- after all, he invented the idea of using an airplane to lead geese on their annual migration (a story retold fictionally in the 1996 Hollywood movie Fly Away Home).

But two decades ago he was struck by the fragility of homes that are built above ground, which are constantly degraded by the elements and have to be repaired often, and by the waste of energy to warm structures that are whipped by the wind.

During travels in Europe, he had been inspired by the hardiness of 3,000-year-old dwellings in Sicily, by the organic curves of the buildings of Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi, and by the books of British underground home pioneer Roger Dean.

In 1988, he decided to build his dream home on the property where he and his family had lived since the 1970s in a drafty, prefab wooden Viceroy cottage.

He and his sons went to work with earth-movers, hacking the top off a hill, then built a set of connected onion-shaped steel domes.

They covered the domes with a netting of eight-inch steel squares and a layer of expanded metal lath, which they sprayed with concrete inside and trawled smooth. They applied an inner layer of concrete mixed with marble powder, creating a luminous glow in each room, and coated the outside with waterproof tar, a layer of sand and a membrane of rubber sheeting.

"It 's like a big molehill," Mr. Lishman says. "They have similar galleries, a central room and passageways so that if they hear a worm they can zap out."

When the structure was complete, Mr. Lishman and his sons replaced the topsoil on top of the hill, burying the home under what became a carpet of grass and wildflowers dotted with spacey-looking domed skylights.

They double-wired and double-plumbed the structure and put in generous conduits to allow for future tinkering, since it would be difficult to work on the structure once it was sealed and buried.

The work took a year, and the cost at the end of it was about $400,000, Mr. Lishman says.

Now that he's lived more than 12 years in the molehill, Mr. Lishman says he feels strange when he visits above-ground houses.

"I feel they are fragile. There are no squeaks or creaks here . . And I feel a bit claustrophobic in a normal house. With vertical windows, a normal house gives the feeling of an overcast day. This a much more uplifting feeling. That's why churches are built with domes."

But at the start, he confesses, he was a bit worried about whether he'd like living there.

He had to custom-build all the kitchen cabinets, to fit around the curving wall, and buy furniture that would fit into a round space instead of a square one. Even hinges on the oval doors between rooms had to be custom-made. Square appliances don't fit well, so he designed a round fridge that sits inside a large drum and pops up to eye level with the press of an airlift switch.

Then there's the problem of pictures -- you cannot hang them in a spherical room.

After years of improvising with hangings, plants and eye-catching objects perched on top of things, Mr. Lishman has had a great idea -- he plans to install projectors and shine pictures directly on to the smooth white walls.

"We'll be able to eat dinner in front of the Taj Mahal," he laughs.

The central living room, where his big-screen TV and stereo make the most of the fabulous acoustics afforded by a circular space, has a trapeze as a centre-piece.

Mr. Lishman swings on it daily to stretch and exercise, and says it is always a huge hit with child visitors and during parties.

For a design so radical, there have been very few problems, Mr. Lishman says. Once, some algae got into the water pipes that warm the house via an external furnace, and he had to hook up a pump and blow out the gelid water.

Another time, he left the door open on a windy night, and the air pressure that built up inside the house blew off one of the skylights. Mr. Lishman and his wife scrambled on to the roof, naked, and wrestled to get the skylight back in place while thunder and lightning crashed around them, he recalls gleefully.

Now he keeps heavy iron weights on the skylight rims.

Mr. Lishman tries hard to persuade others that round, underground housing is the way to go, but usually finds the imagination of his listeners falters when they hear of the expense and work involved.

He gets about thee inquiries a week from people who see pictures of the home on his website and want to emulate it.

"Once I finish talking to them they usually decide to do something different. Because it's underground they think it must be cheaper. But once you get outside the norm in any kind of construction it gets more expensive. The system is designed for subdivision boxes."

But Mr. Lishman believes homes like his could be mass-produced economically in specific circumstances -- such as a trailer park, where standard-sized domes and supports could be replicated.

He says he talked to a U.S. mobile-home builder about the protection from tornadoes that his building approach could provide, "but he didn't buy it."

Mr. Lishman is used to doubters.

He once offered some motorcycle mechanics the use of a lift device to bring bikes up to eye level while they worked on them. They weren't interested, but he persuaded them to try it. "When I went back for it I couldn't get it away from them," Mr. Lishman says. "We get stuck in our traditions. We resist change."