Flintstone House

The Flintstone House is a free-form, single-family residence in Hillsborough, California, overlooking and easily seen from the Doran Memorial Bridge carrying Interstate 280 over San Mateo Creek. The house was designed by architect William Nicholson and built in 1976 as one of several experimental domed buildings using new materials. The idea takes its inspiration from the airframe homes designed by architect Wallace Neff. Built on a concrete slab foundation, the residence was constructed by spraying shotcrete onto steel rebar and wire mesh frames over inflated aeronautical balloons. It was built by a company named Fame Homes and designed to resist wildfires and earthquakes. The home's first owners were Tyrone and Norma Thompson and Mrs. Thompson planned to give lectures and tours of the home once it was completed. It has approximately of living space including three bedrooms, one accessed via a spiral staircase inspired by an ice cream cone that at the top is the same diameter as the room, and two bathrooms, and has a two-car garage. All the interior surfaces are rounded, and the master bathroom has a floor of rocks instead of tiles. Originally off-white in color, the house was repainted deep orange in 2000, and one of the domes was later painted purple. The house is known popularly as the "Flintstone House", from The Flintstones, a Hanna-Barbera Productions animated cartoon series of the early 1960s about a Stone Age family. It is also known as the Dome House, the Gumby House, the Worm Casting House, the Bubble House, and "The Barbapapa House", from Barbapapa, a character and series of books created by Annette Tison and Talus Taylor in the 1970s. By the mid-1980s the house had fallen into disrepair, as water runoff from higher on the mountainside damaged the foundation, causing the walls to crack. After failed attempts at sealing the cracks, it was extensively restored in 1987. San Francisco Bay Area architect Eugene Tsui undertook to remodel the house during the first decade of the 2000s.