Round pegs in a square world

Celia Williams decided to bust out. After a lifetime of teaching, she wanted to live differently at her Altadena property, to explore her Native American heritage.

She bought a tepee.

Julian Fielder needed space. The opera singer’s Silver Lake house wasn’t big enough for two creative people. His partner, actor Christopher Grossett, is a tennis fanatic. Fielder couldn’t take the bop-bop of TV tennis while he tried to study his librettos. “I looked into building an addition to the house,” Fielder says. “I couldn’t afford it. But I had to do something.”

He bought a Mongolian yurt.

Elaine Keith, a onetime psychotherapist who teaches yoga, Pilates and alternative health techniques, was determined to get closer to the rhythms of nature, to better practice what she taught, and to feel better.

Two years ago, she found 20 acres in Kern County, northeast of Santa Barbara. She wanted to teach classes out there, far from the madding crowds of her former homes in Houston and L.A., and she needed shelter, a country home.

She bought a geodesic dome.

All three were certainly attracted to the idea of living in circular structures with an aura about them. But it’s not just that. Ironically, perhaps, as America becomes ever more mobile, our structures become more expensive and are as stationary as ever. Suddenly, yurts, domes and tepees begin to look like serious alternatives. Permanent enough, impermanent enough, cheap enough, and with pluses we haven’t even thought of yet.

“The tepee today is the result of 10,000 years of development,” says Troy Evans, who lives in Highland Park but learned to make tepees in Montana. “It is a brilliant design. Its conical shape, its amazing amount of room. It can withstand 100 mph winds, and snows.”

Evans, who plays Frank the admitting clerk on NBC’s “ER,” has become a strong advocate for the Plains Indian-designed tepee, incorporating Blackfoot and Sioux techniques. “The Blackfoot mostly use the Sioux design these days,” Evans says, “because it uses a basic three-pole stand rather than four. It’s much easier to put up.”

He says tepees use 17 poles altogether, including two to regulate the smoke flaps. Are they comfortable? Absolutely, Evans insists. With the bottom eight inches off the ground, and a top opening that you can regulate, the airflow keeps you comfortable in summer, he says. With insulation, tepees also handle the cold. “You could live in it year-round here in L.A.,” he says. And no, you don’t have to “crouch over” inside. “It’s incredibly spacious. In an 18-footer, you could have a cocktail party for a dozen.”

Cooking also is a cinch, using a stove or the traditional fire ring in the middle. (Remember, no tent pole to worry about.) Smoke goes out through flaps at the top.

For Evans and his wife, Heather, it all started when they bought some land beside a lake in Montana. “I bought a tepee there from a Montana company run by a hippie guy up there,” Evans says. The couple used it as a guesthouse.

Back in Highland Park, Heather was launching a successful career as a blacksmith. She needed a sheltered space to work.

“We couldn’t build on this [Highland Park] property,” Troy Evans says, “but we discovered that to erect a temporary structure we didn’t need the same permits. So I looked at the tepee we had bought and I said to myself, ‘I could make that.’ I’d never sewed anything. But I used that first one as a template, bought 100 yards of canvas, found an industrial sewing machine on EBay, and just started.”

He decided to use hemp canvas because it does a better job of resisting L.A.’s sun and the chemicals of smog. He brought a bunch of lodgepole pine trunks down from Montana and finally presented Heather with her workshop at the bottom of their garden -- an 18-foot tepee. Heather now clangs away at her forge inside, on the compressed dirt floor.

When word of Evans’ new skills spread to the “ER” set, star Noah Wyle asked Evans to make him one. He has since made about 20 tepees, charging between $400 and $4,000, depending on size and decoration.

“Oh, and that should be ‘t-i-p-i,’ not ‘t-e-p-e-e,’ ” he says. “The Blackfoot people prefer it spelled that way. Actually, they call these ‘lodges.’ ”

Williams’ “lodge,” which she bought from Evans, stands on her hilly, tree-strewn half acre in Altadena, furnished inside with a futon, chair, table and books on American Indians. It has become part of her gardening, stress-relief routine. “Sometimes after I’ve spent the morning or the evening working in the yard, I’ll go in there and sit and meditate. It’s very good therapy.”

But most of all, she loves having her grandkids, Jorden, 15 months, and Gabriella, 7, for sleepovers. “I like to show [them] the naturalist, conservationist ways of their heritage,” she says.

Fielder, whose half-acre property is just 10 minutes from his workplace in downtown L.A.’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, chose a yurt for pragmatic and romantic reasons. Yurts have provided shelter to nomadic Mongolian families since Genghis Khan’s days. Their design -- a “hamburger bun propped up by French fries,” as one wit described it -- is basically a cone-shaped array of roof struts pushing down against a circular latticework wall. A simple belt around the middle prevents collapse. Yurts, being circular, are stalwart wind-resisters.

Fielder went to Seattle to buy a kit. Apart from at first putting the canvas covering on inside out, construction was no problem. “I put in extra-large French doors, some of my Navajo rug collection on the walls, and bookshelves all the way around. I had 200 opera scores I needed to have on hand. Now this is where I study for upcoming operas.”

Altogether, he paid “around $14,000, $15,000” (compared with “at least $30,000” for a standard room addition). But it’s not just the money he’s saved: There is something about the round shape, the lightness, the great support-free space that appeals to him. “It has been a wonderful, freeing experience. As a child, I wanted my own treehouse. Tarzan! A yurt gives you all that.”

“When that blows down, you can come stay with us,” Kern County neighbors told Elaine Keith in August 2003, when she moved into her geodesic dome. Here, you’re talking not just circular but spherical. Keith feels she’s tuning into sympathies that go to, well, molecular level.

“The cells in our bodies are more circular than square,” she says. “I’m sure being within this shape resonates with us.” Two years ago, she found her site and started erecting her 20-foot dome. She didn’t worry about wind. “This dome is supposed to [resist] up to 200 mph winds.”

Besides, she believes in the “sacred geometry” of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic design, and in Bucky’s dictum to do “more with less.” The geodesic dome is “the lightest, strongest and most cost-effective structure ever devised,” according to Keith’s suppliers, Rainier Yurts in Seattle.

Keith, who paid about $5,000 for her structure, says there are surprise benefits to living in a sphere. Good acoustics, for starters, help with her yoga. “Sitting in the middle of the dome, toning, you actually hear yourself. The sound centers on you.”

Downsides? “I get sick of zipping and unzipping the front door. I’d like a solid door like in a yurt.” She also has to keep batteries that are charged by her solar and windmill generators, and put up with more primitive facilities: “I use a porta-potty.”

On the other hand, she says nothing in her experience compares with lying in the loft bed she constructed inside her dome, with the skin of the dome’s apex peeled back (in summer it allows for ventilation). “I stare straight up at the Milky Way. Nothing between us. You can feel every muscle in your body relaxing.”

And of course, all three of these round homes can be pulled down in a day or two, dumped into the back of your pickup and taken off to the next life you choose. Sometimes, it seems, you can take it with you.

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Bill Manson is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He can be reached at home@latimes.com.