Dropping out of college, moving to a village and living against the grain of the family are not decisions taken lightly. However, for John Jose Sanchez and John Ignatius Olveira it felt like a path they were meant to walk. His community life and his short three-year career in Architecture and Design gave them the mind set necessary to get out of the mold and innovate in a business that was not yet known in the country. In 2011, being just 21 and 25 years old respectively, they decided to make domes.
In the world of bioconstruction, recent years have witnessed the creation of a new trend: the glampings. Named after glamorous camping, the premium tents Dome-shaped are increasingly being seen at resorts, hotel chains, and events.
“Now they are common, but 12 years ago nobody knew what a dome was,” says Juan José Sánchez, founder of Domos Córdoba. Since they started in 2011, the company already manufactured more than 500 domes for tourism projects, festivals like Lollapalooza, and they taught how to build them at events and universities in various parts of Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, and Barcelona.
With very similar stories to each other, Juan Ignacio and his partner Juan José even share their first name. Sánchez, a native of Catamarca and Olveira from Chubut, both decided to study Architecture and Design in Córdoba. After three years of college and without having crossed paths yet, they decided to leave their studies to settle in villages and live in community.
Although they had shared meetings, it was not until they met again at an event years after leaving mountain life behind that they realized that had in common their desire to transfer what they learned from their experience in the communities. “We wanted to do something new, related to nature that would connect the material with the spiritual,” says Sánchez. This is how a third friend, who is no longer part of the project, came up with the idea of making domes.
Although they had an income from their respective jobs as baker and freighter, they needed more significant financing to start the project. They then went to their families, who did not quite understand what their proposal was about and that, according to them, “no one gave them a trust card where it could work.”
Confident in their vision, they argued that they did not want to start with an already existing business, but rather affirmed that “the key is to look for something that is impossible and make it possible,” according to Sánchez. They were able to borrow $50,000 in 2011, which they used to buy tools and began testing designs and plans.
But they say that undertaking is taking a step forward and two steps back and they lived it firsthand. The first setback was when, after acquiring what was necessary, they found that overnight they had stolen all the new tools. Despite the obstacle, they managed to revive the business four months after starting, when the first customer appeared who they charged up front and used the money to go back to zero.
Time, practice and the alliance with the Van-Gross architecture studio allowed the development and progressive improvement of its products. After a series of experiments they achieved a prototype of domo impermeable and his goal became to make himself known. “That’s when social media came into play. We had to learn photography so that the photos show off the product, we went to events and sold what we could,” Olveira recalls, adding that he also they built a dome and put it up for rent as another source of dissemination.
“We were able to make a living manufacturing domes four years after starting the project”
Juan Ignacio Olveira, co-founder of Domos Cordoba
The first hit in his project was thanks to the wooden kits for self-construction, its most accessible line of domes. “At first we sold only the structure and the clients had to see how to complete it, then we developed the waterproof cover and triangular windows and little by little we completed the kits”, says Sánchez. Since there were clients who did not want to get involved in the construction mess, they began to have several orders to build in different parts of the country.
Emboldened, they set out capitalize on know-how developed so far and began to give courses. “When we had the objective that people get to know the domes, we began to give courses so that they learn to assemble them. We started in camps with people who wanted to go live in the mountains, we made calls through social networks and we came to give workshops in Uruguay, in the Riviera Maya and in Barcelona”, he recounts, and said between laughs: “We who left through the small door ended up teaching at the University of Córdoba”.
Sánchez acknowledges that the courses paid off. “The people who learned with us began to be players who made the team,” explains Olveira. This way, They sold training while training their future colleagues and today almost 40 people work in the venture.
“We started building domes for a soccer field and went on to build domes for various editions of Lollapalooza, they called us and hired us”
Juan Ignacio Olveira, co-founder of Domos Cordoba
Until 2019, they only sold the “shell” of the dome and the buyer then had to take care of the interior. “Today I think and I don’t know how we managed to sell structures so that people could see what to do with it later,” Olviera acknowledges.
Like everyone else, the pandemic caught them by surprise. With their travels paralyzed, they decided to document the step-by-step construction of a dome to make virtual tutorials that they now sell to different countries. “Between the 19 face-to-face courses and the digital academy, we have already trained around 500 people with us”says Sanchez.
Although the demand for the domes began by allocating their use in studios, greenhouses or simple cabins, the improvement of the constructions currently allow them to be used as housing. “We work together with the Van-Gross studio and do bioarchitecture works. We assemble complete houses for the ecotourism development which are already available in Mendoza, Jujuy and Córdoba, they are used as multipurpose rooms, spaces to do yoga or covered places in the gardens”, he details.
Today, the founders work in a dome in Los Aromos, the town in Cordoba where they live, to eventually put it up for tourist rental.
Specialists estimate that for a work with a high performance of completions, the price is around US$900 per square meter. Regarding the different products, they exemplify that an already assembled 33 square meter dome -which is the one they sell the most for tourism- costs around US$30,000.
Meanwhile, the most accessible options are the self-construction kits that do not have infrastructure such as electrical and thermal installation. These start from the $350,000 for 7 m² and they get to have up to 80 m².