Three-Wing Octagonal House
I have always wanted to design, build (read: have somebody build), and live in an octagonal house. In 2002, I sat down with a basic vector drawing program and designed one.
However, that original design didn’t age well. When I started reevaluating it I realized that I hadn’t defined any sizes, certain things just wouldn’t work, and so on. So, in the early days of 2005, I redid my plan mostly from scratch (though the new one has many of the same features as the first) and in a more flexible format. The result is a large, pleasantly organized single-family home well suited to Melissa’s and my needs with plenty of flexibility for any additional future family members, guests, and so on.
Three-Wing Octagonal House (PDF).
In addition to what you see in the above PDF, I have some interesting technical plans. Being a nerd, the house will be very, very high-tech—high speed business-class networking (wired & wireless), power redundancy through line power augmented with solar and/or wind power, steel frame for protection from earthquakes and hurricanes and other disasters, and more.
Should be expensive ;-).
Scott,
My family and I lived in a steel framed octagonal house in Colorado for eight years. It was built on top of Conifer Mountain outside of Denver and was on a ridge overlooking Denver at an elevation of 9,862 ft. The front of the house hung over the edge of the ridge. With the steel frame I was able to build the exterior walls almost entirely out of glass. We had a panoramic view of Denver out of the front windows and could see almost 100 miles on clear days. The steel frame appeared to be salvaged from an old industrial building as a lot of the beams and columns had torch holes and other abnormalities in strange locations. But, it was solid as a rock. We survived a number of Colorado blizzards.
You are on the right track. The octagon shape had some challenges, but once you got onto the 45 and 22.5 degree angles, it wasn’t hard to deal with at all. And, it made everything seem really interesting.
Good Luck.