For Texas custom home builder Kelly Beal, plans for the 60-foot residential pyramid he's constructing outside Fort Worth, Texas, came about just the way many designs for more conventional houses do--on a piece of scratch paper. "You've heard about the old bar napkin?" says Beal, president and CEO of Kelly Beal Custom Homes in Fort Worth. "Well, we literally started by sketching out things on a piece of scratch paper. It doesn't really matter what the house is, you still have your basic rooms. All the elements that go into a home are certainly there, but it just looks like a pyramid."
Of course, the house that Justin, Texas, resident Omas Lewayne Peterson commissioned has elements that you probably wouldn't find in most homes. Close to 180,000 pounds of steel framing beams will be used for structural support in the 6,500-square-foot home. The first floor will use approximately 1,200 yards of solid concrete and includes the garage, main bedrooms, media room, and kitchen. Each of the six rooms on this floor will be a 28-by-28-foot concentric dome. The pyramid structure, floors two and three, will be built immediately above this concrete section of the home. A spiral staircase will connect the second floor to a 20-foot-high glass catwalk.
"We're not stacking stones to complete this structure as they did in Egyptian times," says Beal. "We still don't know how they did some of the things they did to build the pyramids. But it's that long-standing curiosity and mystery surrounding them and their construction that spark an interest in many people, including Mr. Peterson."
Learn more about markets featured in this article: Dallas, TX.
