From a Blue Dome to the Dome House: The Renovation Story

Long before it was Calgary's most talked-about stay, the Dome House was a 1971 prototype — the Langner Spherical House, one of only two prefabricated geodesic domes in Calgary, built as a pre-cut kit home from a colour-coded frame. Calgarians have called it the soccer ball house for fifty years. In 2025 it was added to the City's Inventory of Evaluated Historic Resources.

In October 2022, three founders — Rylia Fielding, Eva Xu and Nathalie Kante — bought the weathered blue dome. They thought it would be a rental, not a big job. They ended up redoing essentially everything: exterior drainage, hidden damage throughout, and a garage so rotted it fell down when they started taking it apart. The exterior was taken apart and rebuilt piece by piece, with an engineer consulted to confirm it was done properly.

The black cladding was a feat in itself. Metal roofing contractor Construct Vision tells it as '20 roofing companies said no. We said yes' — every triangular face had to be individually framed, sealed, and clad by hand. All of the exterior walls and the garage were spray foamed — the dome had been framed 2x4 instead of 2x6 — and the owners spent a week with a specialty tool sanding the inside of the exterior walls to restore the dome's geometric shape after an overspray. When they stripped the exterior, they found it coated in truck bed liner — that was why the house was not breathing. They replaced the entire exterior, brought everything up to current building code, and passed all inspections.

They worked on the house nonstop for a year, eight hours a day after their day jobs, every evening — and more than 100 friends pitched in. The whole scope, permits, plans, the build, landscaping and interior decorating, was completed in one year. Their motivation was always to preserve the house: not just a house, a piece of art, an iconic building, kept in its shape and made livable so people could share in the magic it was created with.

On the last day, the owner and a girlfriend helping her clean and place furniture put in one of those starlight ceiling projectors made for kids' rooms — and because of the dome's shape, it spread the stars across the entire ceiling and all the way down to the floor. They sat on the couch with a glass of wine, looked at each other, laughed, and said 'this is the best date night ever.'

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