Nicolette and Ian built 12 earthen domes in 12 months in the middle of the Chihuahuan desert — no construction experience required, no contractor, and no material more exotic than the dirt under their feet.

Their method is superadobe — long tubes of earth coiled upward, layer by layer, barbed wire between each course for tensile strength, until the walls curve inward and close into a dome. Nicolette estimates each dome runs between $2,000 and $8,000 to build.

Each dome is a single room — kitchen, bedroom, living room, shower — and that’s the logic of the whole system. You can move in fast (they came out of a camper) and the home grows with you. Break through a wall, add a hallway, attach another dome. When it’s complete, the linked cluster will total around 2,000 square feet, feeling less like a house than a small desert village.

What they’ve built doesn’t ask you to sacrifice much. There’s hot running water, enough solar to charge an electric car, and interiors that are cool and flowing and genuinely beautiful. Greywater cycles back into rain basins planted with natives. The building materials — earth, lime, clay — come from the landscape itself.

Superadobe was developed by Iranian-American architect Nader Khalili, founder of CalEarth, drawing on the ancient earthen building traditions of Iran and Iraq. Earthquake and fire resistant, it can be built by anyone, almost anywhere — Khalili originally conceived it as emergency shelter that could be constructed even in war zones.

They call their home and building school the Mojave Center — they started in the Mojave Desert, but the climate wasn’t right and building codes got in the way, so they moved the whole project to Cochise County, Arizona. Over a thousand people have passed through to learn to build this way. Nicolette and Ian’s bet is that the knowledge matters as much as the structure — that if enough people learn to build from the ground up, literally, something shifts.