One Night in an Earth Dome Eco-Retreat on a Typhoon Superhighway

Welcome to One Night In, a series about staying in the most unparalleled places available to rest your head.

I’ve been fascinated by earth homes since childhood, from the layered adobe brick of Pueblo homes in New Mexico to the Cappadocia-esque caves and bunker-like geodesic domes of Tatooine in Star Wars. Later, that fascination took on a new bent as I developed my career as a journalist who frequently writes about climate disasters and their impact on the areas most often affected by them. Still, I wasn’t thinking much of earthen construction when I visited the Philippine province of Batangas last October to report a story days after a severe tropical storm, Trami, had passed through the area, causing 160 deaths and leaving nearly a million people in need of food or shelter. In a fishing village near a major shipping port on the shore of Batangas Bay, some of my sources had lost their homes. At nearby Taal Lake, which surrounds a volcano of the same name, a friend showed me how a hastily built cliffside road had simply fallen down, leaving both a scar of destruction and a warning against overdevelopment; as if the storm was daring humanity not to test the limits of nature.

This year, near the apex of the Los Angeles wildfires, I spoke to the team at the nonprofit CalEarth, which developed "SuperAdobe" domes built with layers of cylindrical earth bags, about rebuilding with earthen architecture that’s more disaster-resistant—but I had California, not the Philippines, in mind. That changed once they mentioned Beau Baconguis. She had worked as the country director of Greenpeace for more than a decade before resigning in search of something more hands-on. "I wanted to see results," Baconguis told me. Soon after, she found herself on CalEarth’s Hesperia, California, campus learning to build disaster-relief shelters, before going back to the Philippines and building earth domes in its tropical, typhoon-prone climate. She first ran a workshop to build earth shelters after Typhoon Haiyan, which in 2013 became the deadliest typhoon to ever hit the country, using rice sacks for earthbags and election tarpaulin posters for waterproofing. "I didn’t have a choice," she said. "It was very cute because it was all so colorful, like pinks and reds and greens, yellow and blue."

One such dome was built right in Batangas on the grounds of a property called Kapusod. It’s the passion project of Baconguis’s longtime friend, environmental lawyer Ipat Luna, and her husband, broadcast journalist Howie Severino, built to demonstrate sustainable practices, resilience to disaster, and coexistence with nature. There are bamboo huts, compost toilets, a wind-powered well, and gardens growing native fruits and vegetables. It’s turned into a popular weekend getaway and the earth dome, along with several other guesthouses on the property, are now on Airbnb. "We want our guests to appreciate that to be sustainable and ecological doesn’t mean you have to make a big sacrifice," Severino told me when I made the trip to Kapusod in March. "We don’t want being ecological to be associated with discomfort." The idea of using native materials, or going without air-conditioning in the humid tropical climate, have longtime associations with poverty that the pair wanted to break. "Nature has its own solutions to a lot of problems," Severino added. I was already in Manila, a short drive away, so I jumped at the chance to spend the night.

Friday

1 p.m.: I catch a bus due south from Manila’s traffic-choked Cubao bus terminal, hoping to beat the mad rush of weekenders to the expressway that links the capital to the coastal province of Batangas. To reach Kapusod after the two-hour ride to the nearest city of Lipa, it’s either a 30-minute drive or a series of jeepney rides over the winding, hilly roads that reach the shores of Taal Lake. The sleepy town of Balete, named after the strangler fig trees of the Philippines, has woken up in the 12 years since Severino and Luna acquired the land that became Kapusod. Resorts and weekend homes have sprouted up along the lakeshore, each their own self-contained oasis; few, if any, are dedicated to sustainability.

5 p.m.: After arriving in Balete, a quick turn off its narrow yet bustling coastal road whisks me into the Kapusod parking lot, and a few steps later, the open-air restaurant that sits at its center. The small bamboo guesthouses behind it have views of Taal Lake. On the other side of the restaurant, beneath the canopy of native trees, the sound of a waterfall leads me to a natural, unchlorinated pool. Its excavation provided the earth for the small dome which sits humbly nearby, easy to miss under the trees.