By Sara Anne Donnelly
Photos by Nagle Media Company
From the Fall 2023 issue of Maine Homes by Down East
Last year, Boston entrepreneur Josh Johnson’s search for a vacation home led him to an off-grid concrete dome on 42 wooded acres in Kennebunkport. “I really wanted it,” he says. “I saw, obviously, that it would be a great Airbnb, but I also knew it was a really special place that I could keep forever and that would give me purpose.”
Johnson considered more conventional retreats in northern New England before falling for this inhabitable “piece of art,” built in 2003 by sculptor Daphne Pulsifer with input from Texas’s Monolithic Dome Institute, which promotes the energy-efficient concrete forms. A visitor finds the dome via Road to Misery, a rough access way through dense forest named, Johnson was told, for the hassle Pulsifer and her family endured clearing it. The road terminates at a roundabout beside a rocky pasture and Pulsifer’s sculpture, rising from a granite ledge like a giant gray gumdrop. “It’s not very pretty from the outside,” admits Johnson, who plans to paint it. “One person on Facebook described it as a bunker.”
An Airbnb reviewer described Josh Johnson’s concrete Kennebunkport home as “a monolithic dome” with “a tidbit of a New England cottage,” noting that the interior “somehow feels expansive and cozy at the same time.” Hand-crafted details include balustrades, posts, and beams fashioned from the property’s trees; ruddy porcelain floor tiles inlaid with a compass rose; and a 12-foot-long steel pot rack on the curved kitchen wall.
But the interior is sun-drenched and cheerful, with 12-foot-tall windows punctuating mottled sprayed-concrete walls and artful accents made by Pulsifer and her husband, Daniel Bates: balustrades, posts, and beams of bark-stripped trees harvested during the road clearing, Tolkienesque oak and pine doors with geometric glass inlays, and a 12-foot-long steel pot rack that curves along the kitchen wall. “You’re so amazed by everything that you don’t necessarily notice that this is an off-grid structure and how am I going to heat it in the winter when I’m not here?” Johnson says, recalling his initial tour.
Since buying the place, he’s tried to make it more functional without compromising its charm. He installed a propane furnace in the basement to supplement the kitchen’s woodstove, put in a new kitchen range, and repainted soot-darkened walls bright white for a “modern Mediterranean vibe.” (One Airbnb reviewer compared the effect to “being on the inside of an egg.” She gave the dome five stars.)
Recently, Johnson added a second-floor powder room with a built-in vanity finished in undulating concrete that blends with the rest of the interior. “I’m trying to do things right,” he says. “But an artist literally built this. It’s kind of intimidating to have that to live up to.”
From $275/night. airbnb.com/h/the-dome-home
