As dusk settles over California’s high desert, a smooth white dome begins to glow against the boulder-strewn foothills. This is HATA—meaning "home" in Ukrainian—a striking monolithic concrete holiday house near Pioneertown, and it blurs the line between sculpture and shelter. Designed and built by Anastasiya Dudik, a Ukrainian-born designer, the dwelling is a study in contrasts: Brutalist in its raw materiality yet gentle in form, elemental yet elevated, futuristic yet deeply rooted in ancient forms. With its curved silhouette rising 16 feet high and porthole windows glowing like moons, HATA appears both otherworldly and uncannily at home in the landscape.
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| Dome architect Anastasiya Dudik |
HATA sits perched on the stony foothills of the Sawtooth Mountains, overlooking the quirky frontier village of Pioneertown below—a town originally built in 1946 as a live-in Old West movie sets. Despite this Wild West backdrop (and the occasional tumbleweed), the dome doesn’t feel like a misplaced spaceship so much as a natural extension of the terrain. Its rounded concrete form rises from the earth like a pale boulder, ancient and unfamiliar at once. In fact, far from clashing with its surroundings, HATA stands apart as a kind of futuristic dreamscape that complements Pioneertown’s nostalgic illusion of the past, forging a dialogue between eras under the desert sky.
Amazingly, Dudik realized this ambitious project without any formal architecture training or a crew of contractors—she taught herself over a decade of hands-on experimentation. Her vision for HATA was shaped by two worlds she straddles: the austere concrete cityscapes of her Soviet-era childhood and the free-spirited dome culture of California. She drew inspiration from memories of Soviet Brutalism and the region’s futuristic design lineage. (The desert, after all, has its share of iconic domes: just north of here in Landers stands the Integratron, a 38-foot-tall wooden cupola built in 1959 amid extraterrestrial ambitions, and nearby Joshua Tree is home to the sandbag-built Bonita Domes, an otherworldly cluster straight out of Star Wars.) Yet HATA is no mere pastiche of influences. Dudik describes her approach as “future primitive” – essentially, a return to organic, ancestral forms through a futuristic lens. The goal was for the design to feel both ancient and otherworldly, "a sculptural, earth-integrated structure that invites a slower, more connected way of being".
The HATA dome was constructed in an equally unconventional way. Dudik began with an inflatable airform (essentially a giant balloon) to shape the hemisphere, then layered it with a lattice of rebar and sprayed-on concrete (shotcrete), finally finishing it in hand-troweled stucco. The result is a seamless steel-reinforced shell that’s remarkably tough and weather-hardy. Thick and continuous, the concrete walls provide both structure and insulation, giving the house a natural thermal inertia—keeping the interior at a steady, comfortable temperature despite the desert’s 50-degree day-night swing. The dome’s curvature and materials make it inherently fire-resistant and earthquake-resilient, engineered to shrug off wildfires and tremors. In an age of climate extremes, this experimental home doubles as a kind of concrete refuge, a fort against the elements that requires minimal energy to keep cool or warm.
From the outside, HATA has a deceptively simple appearance: a pure white dome emerging from the earth, its smooth stucco skin punctured by a scatter of circular porthole windows. One flank of the dome is boldly sliced open to create a broad arched entryway facing a patio and pool – a deliberate cut that offers unobstructed views of the horizon. Through huge sliding glass panels, the interior flows out to a circular saltwater pool and spa, blurring indoor and outdoor living. At sunset, the dome’s openings glow with firelight and lamplight, while outside a boulder-framed amphitheater and fire pit provide front-row seats to the spectacular night sky. The entire composition feels at once primal and luxurious: guests can soak in a hot tub beneath the stars or gather around flames, all in the silhouette of a structure that looks like it landed from the future.
Step inside, and the dome’s volume unfolds in one broad, continuous expanse. The main hall is an open-plan living area and kitchen under the soaring 16-foot dome, with a circular conversation pit sunken into the floor at its heart for lounging. In the private half of the house, two understated bedrooms nestle behind curving walls, each with its own en-suite bathroom for secluded comforts. Transitions between spaces are seamless—there are no harsh corners or hard edges anywhere. Sunlight slips in through the circular apertures and the grand entry, drifting gently across the hand-troweled plaster walls (which have a subtle, lunar-like texture in dusty off-white). Many of the interior furnishings are integral to the architecture itself: benches and shelves emerge organically from the concrete shell, and natural boulders integrated into the floor serve as side tables or sculptural decor. The kitchen is both rustic and futuristic, featuring a gleaming stainless-steel island and backsplash paired with rich mahogany cabinetry. Despite all the concrete and steel, the atmosphere is cocoon-like and calm—acoustics are hushed under the curved ceiling, and every sightline is smooth and gentle, resulting in a meditative sense of refuge.
Ultimately, HATA presents a fusion of the primal and the futuristic that feels utterly natural. For Dudik, concrete isn’t just a construction material but a medium of meaning: drawn to its permanence, she sees it as a symbol of strength and continuity in a world of flux. In this project, she has reclaimed the brute strength of Brutalist concrete and tempered it with curves and light, creating a structure that is both refuge and statement. HATA is not just an eye-catching desert retreat, but a quiet manifesto for architecture with heart. It proves that sustainability can have soul, and that a house can be as emotionally evocative as it is resilient. The experience of staying here is something like time-travel: you feel grounded in an ancient shelter even as you gaze up at a space-age vault of sky. Just minutes from Joshua Tree’s otherworldly rockscapes, HATA offers more than a place to stay—it offers a portal, inviting visitors to slow down, connect with the land, and reimagine the very notion of “home”.
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