After 22 years of travel, photographer and musician Steve Arin has found the perfect place to make his lifelong dream of building his own home come true.
In 2011, he visited his old friend Hajar Gibran, who has inspired Steve with his creative ideas for many years. This time he was building concrete and clay domes in northeastern Thailand. He and his wife offered Steve a place on their mango farm to build their own home.
Following Hajjar’s design ideas, Steve set to work on the construction, and within six weeks he had erected and painted the foundation for his future home – the dome walls.
The basic structure cost about $6,000. He took several weeks to add details such as doors, screens, a pond, stonework and landscaping. All this, together with furniture, came out under $ 3,000. The total cost of the clay house turned out to be about $9,000.
“If there was a long building process, I probably wouldn’t have ventured into it,” says Steve. “Low cost of materials and time efficient technology” is what attracted me to this project.
