- This is a Smurf house.
Actually, I'm just kidding.
Everyone knows Smurfs are extinct.
A French house cat named d'Artagnan killed and ate
the last known Smurf in 1964.
So this is a house for humans, maybe even for you.
- The idea is to rethink what's possible
when you think about your home.
- These folks are coming up with new ways
to make homes on an assembly line
using carbon negative cement.
Why do this?
Well, in a state that is increasingly on fire?
- Overnight, another wave of destruction.
Thousands of structures remain under threat.
- It might be a good idea to make homes
from fire-resistant materials.
- Zomes was born out of my brother and myself
wanting to build something on our property
so that when our parents visit from Egypt,
they have a place to stay.
And building something out of wood
just made very little to no sense to us.
- Even without wildfires,
we are in the midst of a massive housing shortage.
All over the US there are people who can't afford
to live near where they work.
So right now, lots of people are trying
to shake up the way we build homes,
because there's just not enough of them.
- If we knew all the challenges
and understood why there's little innovation
in the construction industry, then we would've never tried.
You have to be ignorant and arrogant enough to assume
that you could do something different, which we did.
- Beyond the design and materials
of these Zomes is an idea that could totally change
the way we build and it might be the way
to a future without housing shortages.
This is "Hard Reset,"
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
Sonoma County is a great place to buy wine
and learn about Zomes.
So that's where we went.
- Mike walk, take two, marker.
And action.
- What are we doing? - Great question.
I never know.
Let's start here with the elephant in the room,
or the giant dragon egg in the room.
What are we looking at here?
Well, what we're looking at here is our Zome.
- This is Mike.
He gave me a free cup of coffee
and then he showed me around the factory
where they make these Zomes.
They're small structures you can build
in your backyard or almost anywhere.
One of the first things you notice
about these structures is the outer shell,
which is made of a special kind of cement.
- This is our rock shop where we make the concrete
shells that are the exterior of the Zome.
- Portland cement, or what we call concrete.
That's what you see on the roads.
And generally what we see
as concrete causes about eight to 10%
of carbon emissions in the world.
- The man with the impressive tattoos is Karim.
- I'm pretty much out of space for tattoos.
- He and his team have formulated a different
kind of cement that is actually carbon negative.
- One of the things that's amazing
about magnesium phosphate cement is that it sequesters
more carbon from the atmosphere
over its life cycle than it produces in its production.
It's similar to the compound used
in things like the pyramids and the Greek amphitheater.
So it's highly bioavailable, It's incredibly resilient,
lasts for hundreds and hundreds of years,
and also it's incredibly resistant to heat.
So it's pretty amazing in that way.
- Even though the folks
at Zomes have their own unique formulation,
magnesium phosphate cement is not new.
It's been used in one form or another for millennia,
but that's just the outside of the structures.
The inside is made of complicated geometry.
- So tell me where we're at and what we're seeing here.
- What we're seeing here is the frame shop or the wood shop.
- The outer cement shell is just
a fireproof shield for the inner wooden frame,
which they assemble here as components
to be put together on site.
- Our primary issue was actually earthquakes.
Initially the plan was to not have any wood
in the structure, but concrete is very bad
at flexural and tensile strength.
So if you try and bend or twist concrete, it's brittle,
whereas wood is very good
at kind of like twisting and bending and not breaking.
- Each piece of lumber
is cut into a specific shape
so it can fit together into a larger geometric arrangement
called a zonohedron
That's where they got the Z in Zomes.
They're not like big Zima fans or anything.
- Nice bottle, What is it?
- Zima. - Beer?
- No. Something different.
- We like to say there's no place like Zome.
- Zokay, zounds good.
Anyway, the frame and outer cladding are made
on an assembly line
and then shipped to be put together on site.
This is totally different from how most homes are made.
The idea here is that these structures can be made
from a kid of heart.
Instead of requiring a whole construction crew
to frame a house over the course of months,
you and your friends could put this together in a few weeks.
The Zome is not a new idea.
Architect Steve Baer was building them as early
as the 1960s and many others have made similar designs.
- It uses the principles of biomimicry,
which is to look like things in nature.
It just elicits a different feeling being
inside a circular kind of naturally shaped structure.
- These Zomes are just over
240 square feet inside, which is not a lot,
but the organic shape can make it feel more spacious
with wide curving walls and a high ceiling.
Also, turns out this toilet was not hooked
up to plumbing.
Anyway, live and learn.
- I actually don't think there is a single 90 degree angle
in the entire structure,
and not because
we were allergic to these angles or anything,
it's just that's the most efficient
and effective way to build it.
- No matter how spacious the curving walls feel,
these Zomes are still very compact.
Are these really potential replacements
for traditional homes?
- So we initially designed the Zome with an ADU in mind
whether it was a gym or just a place for solitude,
whatever it is, just the kind of an extra space.
But what we've realized as we started building it
is the vast majority of people were interested
in living in it, and that's when we moved more
to a kind of a tiny home alternative basically.
- It's easy to imagine one person living here
or maybe a couple with really great communication skills.
But if you want to raise kids, it might get real hard.
- We're also already built
and designed a hallway where you can connect multiple
even different sized Zomes.
You can have one 400 square foot Zome
with two 265 square foot Zomes attached to it
kind of in a pod formation.
We find it a really natural way to think
about your home is you wanna slowly expand it
in the same kind of beautiful way
as you built the initial kind of structure that you live in.
- [Narrator] Zomes aren't meant to replace
the way every home is built,
but there's an important idea
at work here that should change the way every home is built.
- I've had experience with construction myself
and it's always been pretty difficult.
The industry's full of high promises.
Everything's made to look easy before you do it.
And then once you start,
everything takes three times as long
and it costs at least twice as much.
- Modern manufacturing has the potential
to bring down costs for homes, which would be amazing.
But even having just a reliable set price
for construction would be a huge improvement by itself.
- We always give our customers a quote
and then that quote is solid.
I think about this
as a restorative experience for construction.
Anyone who's been involved in construction
usually has some kind of traumatic experience
of how long things take, how much BS there is,
how much you're at an information disadvantage.
So the base model of the Zome costs $75,000.
That is fully installed with the foundation.
- Traditional construction is notorious
for being expensive, slow, and chaotic,
and almost never stays on budget.
- Well, everything looks pretty well under control.
- It does?
- Well not to the layman's eyes of course.
- But this is still the most common way
that homes are made, on site and from scratch.
The folks at Zomes are just one
of many different attempts to rethink how we do this,
because we don't do anything else this way.
Think of it this way.
If auto workers assembled cars on site from scratch,
the process would be so problematic
that most people wouldn't be able
to afford to have a car made.
The assembly line has made car ownership
into an assumption for most people.
Manufacturing has put smartphones into everyone's pockets
and a car in almost every driveway.
If we can tap into those same assembly line efficiencies,
can we make home ownership
into something just as ubiquitous?
So picture a scenario where the vast majority
of homes were made with the efficiencies
of modern manufacturing.
Homes made of mass produced components that can be assembled
without specialized labor
would be far more affordable and customizable.
- So the idea of Zomes is to have a building
that is beautiful, that is environmentally friendly,
that is fire-resistant, and that can be put up
into your property within a month
and it's done and it's clean.
No heavy machinery, no special equipment,
and no kind of convoluted contracting involved.
My hope for the future is not just more innovation
for the sake of innovation, but more room to allow folks to
kind of solve their own issue and feel proud of where
they live and potentially contribute to their own kind
of building spaces and not feel so victimized.
My hope is to kind of remove that as much as possible.
- In this future,
the homes we build might not look so different
from the homes we already make.
Not everyone wants to live
in a Zome or a dome or a spire after all.
But ideas like Zomes invite us to imagine
what if our homes could shrink and grow as our families do?
Or what if we could make a future
where home ownership wasn't synonymous
with a lifetime of debt?
There's no one way to make that happen,
but there is one way to make sure it doesn't.
And that's to keep doing things the way we already do.
Come back next time for another episode of "Hard Reset".
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