One Night in an Earth Dome Eco-Retreat on a Typhoon Superhighway

Welcome to One Night In, a series about staying in the most unparalleled places available to rest your head.

I’ve been fascinated by earth homes since childhood, from the layered adobe brick of Pueblo homes in New Mexico to the Cappadocia-esque caves and bunker-like geodesic domes of Tatooine in Star Wars. Later, that fascination took on a new bent as I developed my career as a journalist who frequently writes about climate disasters and their impact on the areas most often affected by them. Still, I wasn’t thinking much of earthen construction when I visited the Philippine province of Batangas last October to report a story days after a severe tropical storm, Trami, had passed through the area, causing 160 deaths and leaving nearly a million people in need of food or shelter. In a fishing village near a major shipping port on the shore of Batangas Bay, some of my sources had lost their homes. At nearby Taal Lake, which surrounds a volcano of the same name, a friend showed me how a hastily built cliffside road had simply fallen down, leaving both a scar of destruction and a warning against overdevelopment; as if the storm was daring humanity not to test the limits of nature.

This year, near the apex of the Los Angeles wildfires, I spoke to the team at the nonprofit CalEarth, which developed "SuperAdobe" domes built with layers of cylindrical earth bags, about rebuilding with earthen architecture that’s more disaster-resistant—but I had California, not the Philippines, in mind. That changed once they mentioned Beau Baconguis. She had worked as the country director of Greenpeace for more than a decade before resigning in search of something more hands-on. "I wanted to see results," Baconguis told me. Soon after, she found herself on CalEarth’s Hesperia, California, campus learning to build disaster-relief shelters, before going back to the Philippines and building earth domes in its tropical, typhoon-prone climate. She first ran a workshop to build earth shelters after Typhoon Haiyan, which in 2013 became the deadliest typhoon to ever hit the country, using rice sacks for earthbags and election tarpaulin posters for waterproofing. "I didn’t have a choice," she said. "It was very cute because it was all so colorful, like pinks and reds and greens, yellow and blue."

One such dome was built right in Batangas on the grounds of a property called Kapusod. It’s the passion project of Baconguis’s longtime friend, environmental lawyer Ipat Luna, and her husband, broadcast journalist Howie Severino, built to demonstrate sustainable practices, resilience to disaster, and coexistence with nature. There are bamboo huts, compost toilets, a wind-powered well, and gardens growing native fruits and vegetables. It’s turned into a popular weekend getaway and the earth dome, along with several other guesthouses on the property, are now on Airbnb. "We want our guests to appreciate that to be sustainable and ecological doesn’t mean you have to make a big sacrifice," Severino told me when I made the trip to Kapusod in March. "We don’t want being ecological to be associated with discomfort." The idea of using native materials, or going without air-conditioning in the humid tropical climate, have longtime associations with poverty that the pair wanted to break. "Nature has its own solutions to a lot of problems," Severino added. I was already in Manila, a short drive away, so I jumped at the chance to spend the night.

Friday

1 p.m.: I catch a bus due south from Manila’s traffic-choked Cubao bus terminal, hoping to beat the mad rush of weekenders to the expressway that links the capital to the coastal province of Batangas. To reach Kapusod after the two-hour ride to the nearest city of Lipa, it’s either a 30-minute drive or a series of jeepney rides over the winding, hilly roads that reach the shores of Taal Lake. The sleepy town of Balete, named after the strangler fig trees of the Philippines, has woken up in the 12 years since Severino and Luna acquired the land that became Kapusod. Resorts and weekend homes have sprouted up along the lakeshore, each their own self-contained oasis; few, if any, are dedicated to sustainability.

5 p.m.: After arriving in Balete, a quick turn off its narrow yet bustling coastal road whisks me into the Kapusod parking lot, and a few steps later, the open-air restaurant that sits at its center. The small bamboo guesthouses behind it have views of Taal Lake. On the other side of the restaurant, beneath the canopy of native trees, the sound of a waterfall leads me to a natural, unchlorinated pool. Its excavation provided the earth for the small dome which sits humbly nearby, easy to miss under the trees.

I duck to enter the dome—I’m tall, but regardless of height, it’s not built with standing comfort in mind. The interior is covered entirely by a mural completed with soil paint, an art form pioneered by Indigenous artists in the Philippines; its neutral tones show the country’s endangered endemic animals and plants. "We didn’t want it to be something scary," Severino tells me the next day, and it’s ultimately grounding; I imagine that sheltering from a storm inside this dome must give the feeling of a miniature Noah’s Ark.

There are two small windows and a covered skylight at the top, which was initially supposed to be a fully covered roof to help with erosion. Baconguis and her team instead used elastomeric paint and built a small catchment system around the dome to slow rainfall. It’s been enough for the dome to withstand several typhoons and floods, most recently last year’s Trami. "Personally, I was a skeptic," Severino says. "I had imagined the earth becoming like a pile of mud. But ten years later, the earth dome has never had a leak."

6 p.m.: The sun sets over Taal Lake, turning the water a cinematic deep orange as fishermen pass by. The lake was part of a bay connected to the South China Sea until 1754, when a major eruption by its namesake volcano blocked its outlet to the sea. It’s now home to endemic fish species that have adapted to freshwater, most notably the tawilis sardine. There are several bamboo huts, a towering tree house, and a second earth home available to guests, but Kapusod is quiet tonight, as is the campground next door.

7 p.m.: The on-site restaurant, operated separately from Kapusod by local chefs who cook in an open kitchen just aside from the breezy dining area, nevertheless is heavily influenced by Severino and Luna. Everything is locally sourced, including tawilis during the times of the year when it’s permitted to catch the overfished sardine. The menu is heavy on vegetarian options, including a salad of edible pako ferns. "What we serve is also what we eat," Severino says.

9 p.m.: Severino and Luna return from a party and greet me by the pool. We plan to catch up in the morning, but as Severino and I stand in the now-empty restaurant that occupies the bottom floor of their house, he excitedly tells me about how it came to be. Aside from steel to reinforce load-bearing columns, the building is entirely constructed of bamboo beams, walls, and floors; the floor is even bolted together with handcrafted bamboo pegs instead of nails. It’s remarkably breathable, cooling itself naturally by maximizing the coastal breeze. "We’re hardly using any power from the grid," Severino says.

Saturday

7 a.m.: The dome stays cool and quiet throughout the clear and muggy night. I open the door to the nearby smell of barako coffee, a strong variety grown in Batangas. 

Severino and Luna join me for breakfast at the restaurant’s long common table as chefs begin preparing omelettes and fresh fruit juices. Luna tells me how after the earth dome was built, she was excited to share the idea, convinced that it made for the perfect low-cost disaster-relief shelter. They can be built within days and with locally sourced materials, and much like the bamboo homes of Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari that I visited (and reported on for Dwell) last year, they can be converted into permanent homes. Despite this, Luna says at the breakfast table, most people have dismissed her, saying that people need to rebuild psychological connections to the homes they are used to. She doesn’t buy the reasoning. "Are tents any better?" she asks.

After Typhoon Haiyan, Baconguis heard that the office of then President Benigno Aquino reached out to CalEarth about disaster shelters, "although they didn’t call back," she tells me later on a phone call from her home in the mountainous southern island of Mindanao. "So it didn’t happen." But it was the workshop she held after that storm that gave her belief that earthen homes could be viable relief structures. "It’s easy to build if every family is involved," she says. "And it’s a community construction [project]. You can’t just wait for all these professional builders to come."

9 a.m.: Severino and Luna walk me around the property, just as customers begin showing up for breakfast. The bamboo tree house overlooking Taal Lake was built shortly after they bought the property, they tell me, only for the tree that held it to die; it now rests on a set of bamboo stilts. From the start, it drew "tree house fans" from around the world to Kapusod, Severino says with a smile.

We enter the second earth home, built to resemble a conventional two-story structure with a vaulted ceiling. It was envisioned as a larger structure after the success of the smaller dome, and it’s now rented out to families. A retractable bamboo staircase leads to upstairs bedrooms under a roof of thatched anahaw, a type of palm leaves. The space is full of eccentricities: The compost toilet, made by a local sculptor, only flushes when its stone lid is closed. The door handle to the bathroom is a tiny iron; every doorknob on the entire property is reclaimed.

12 p.m.: Severino and Luna leave for an overnight camping trip and invite me to visit another property they own, a rental home about a half hour away on a cliffside overlooking Taal Lake. The land next door is for sale and they’re afraid it could be purchased by a developer hoping to build a large, unsustainable resort. Luna wonders if anything can be done to stop it.

The view from here should be enough of a warning. I can see landslides caused by the heavy rains of Trami, including the scar of the collapsed cliffside road and an adjacent hotel that was barely spared. In my years of reporting on environmental issues in the Philippines, I’ve seen countless fights like this against cut-and-run developers who get their commission and flee the consequences. Kapusod, set on teaching sustainable alternatives, is up against a Goliath.

5 p.m.: The earth dome is booked tonight, but Severino and Luna have offered me their guest room. Upstairs, the main house is full of traditional instruments, paintings, and various items the pair have collected over the years. The ceiling, which vaults high above a third-story loft, is thatched with anahaw, which Severino explains is becoming a lost art in the Philippines. Kapusod has become a place to preserve threatened traditions, from the use of thatched anahaw roofs to eating pako leaves to hosting lessons for guests in Baybayin, an ancient writing script of the Philippines. 

9 p.m.: The unmistakable sound of karaoke begins to pick up at the campground next door but never becomes obtrusive; our neighbors are respectful of volume and are surprisingly good singers. Severino and Luna’s home begins to cool from its daytime temperature, taking in the lakeside breeze that the earth dome had repelled. Even without a fan or air-conditioner, the breeze at night is colder than I expected.

Netted seating areas built into the floor allow for gazing out at the sunset, or at the bustle of diners below. In a later conversation, as Luna recounts her ongoing inspirations for Kapusod, she tells me how she often thinks about the incompatibility between our standards of comfort and the damage of climate change. She used to teach ecological design at a university, where she says the principle of true comfort "was demonstrated by a hammock that allows the wind to blow through, and for you to be comfortable with a very minimal impact on the environment."

Sunday

9 a.m.: Motorcycle touring groups and large families have flooded Kapusod for breakfast, and downstairs, the staff is rushing to get around to everyone. Some people appear to be regulars. Others sit idly, admiring the scenery. As the crowd picks up, the wait staff is visibly stressed; everyone jumps in to help. Unfortunately, some patrons don’t abide by Kapusod’s zero-waste rules; one group leaves a soiled diaper behind. Most do not stop to admire the earth home, or to notice the pako gardens and compost toilets and reclaimed doorknobs. There’s no time to tell everyone what to expect: to teach the merits of sustainable design, of locally sourced food, of reducing plastic in a country choked by it.

I imagine that while more people will have brief exposures to Kapusod’s ideals, they could also add stress to them. "It’s a double-edged thing," Severino says of local development and the resulting uptick in tourist traffic. "We’re trying to resist having to change what we are. I think there is a market for it, and it also expresses what we are. We didn’t build the place for other people. We built the place for us."

Related Reading:

Why Do We Keep Developing in Climate Disaster Zones?

Are Yasmeen Lari’s "Zero Carbon, Zero Waste, Zero Donor" Bamboo Villages Working?