Sixty feet under

The Garay home nearing completion in Clinton is an underground house built on top of the ground.

That’s not the only unusual element about what Bill Garay calls his “dream home” — one that he estimates will cost just $150 a year in energy bills.

The facade open to the road is a conventional two-story red brick exterior with white columns, an upstairs deck and a bank of windows on either side of the front door. The only clue to the special nature of the site in this tree-lined suburban neighborhood not far from Route 5 is the sight of the sides and rear. They’re rounded and include a planned utility room and garage behind the main structure.

To tease a sense of logic even further, a cupola juts up on the roof, where Bill and Lisa Garay plan to have a garden. The domed roof is made of earth piled atop a cement shell.

The house is more than meets the eye. What an outsider might imagine to be a cavelike interior is really a well-illuminated space. Light comes in from the front and filters down from the cupola onto an open staircase connecting the two floors. There is no basement; storage areas are included in the design. The project is expected to cost around $400,000.

“There’s nothing unusual about the materials, [just] how they are put together,” says Odis Johnson of Design Construction Management Team Inc., the firm that is putting together the 2,300-square-foot house from a “kit” supplied by Formworks Building Inc. of Durango, Colo.

Mr. Johnson has been inventing solutions to match what the couple had in mind for the site — 11/3 acres in the Poplar Hill Estates area.

“We buy a version of the plan and design our own,” says Mr. Garay, a government accountant who clearly is pleased with the gamble he and his wife took when they purchased the plans from Formworks, a company they found on the Internet.

The contract with Formworks includes the steel used on the interior frame but not the cost of the concrete, dirt — some 50 tons of it, wallboard, windows and such things as a sewer and well.

“We’re going on faith, essentially, to see how this thing works. We really don’t know,” he says.

Mr. Garay was looking for energy-efficient homes and thought Formworks had the best model at the best value.

“I like the fact that the house has a small footprint [on the land] and the fact that using concrete means termites and other pests won’t be a problem,” he says. “Another issue I liked is you don’t have to use a whole lot of wood to build it. And it is apparently set up to resist hurricanes and tornadoes.”

Local banks refused the couple a building loan despite professing great curiosity about the project. (They got financing through a Texas bank Mr. Garay had used when he was stationed there with the military.)

The first four contractors they contacted turned them down before the Garays found Mr. Johnson through the Yellow Pages. The architect by training rose to the challenge in part because he hopes to become Formworks’ representative for the Greater Washington area.

Most Formworks homes are built against the side of a hill to take advantage of the site, says company President Dale Piercy, who adds that the building system is designed to “create all kinds of configurations and meet all buildings codes that are pretty much national.”

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