He Builds Curvy, Low-Cost Homes From Soap Foam and Cement

Joel runs with a simple idea his father started: turn cement and soap foam into hand-made building blocks, then stack them into strong, cozy domes. It’s cheap, beginner-friendly, and surprisingly tough.

The Simple Idea That Changed Everything

Aircrete looks like concrete until someone lifts it with one hand. It’s just cement plus a water-based foam, and the ingredients are easy to find almost anywhere. The wild part is how light it is.

The mix gets poured into molds and cures into bricks or custom shapes. It’s basic, flexible, and built for people who want to make their own place without heavy machinery.

How He Actually Makes It

The starter recipe is almost too simple: Portland cement and foam made with dish detergent. A 94-pound bag of cement goes in a tub with six gallons of water and gets blended into a smooth slurry.

Then the foam has to be dialed in. It gets weighed so the density lands around 90–100 grams per liter—too heavy or too light, and the whole batch can go sideways.

A special mixer injects foam right where the blades spin, so it blends evenly as the bucket swells to about 42 gallons of aircrete. It’s weirdly satisfying to watch it fluff up.

When the can is full, the mix gets poured into brick molds—anywhere from four inches thick to chunky twelve-inch blocks if the plan calls for it.

By the next day, the pieces can be eased out of the molds and handled gently. A typical block weighs around ten pounds, so stacking a wall feels more like playing than backbreaking labor.

The Part That Really Makes It Easy

Here’s the thing: aircrete doesn’t rot, rust, or attract bugs, and it insulates as it goes up. It’s tough enough to build with but still soft enough to carve and shape after the fact.

Cutting in a window is low drama. Marks can be scratched right on the face, and even a screw bites without fuss because the material is forgiving.

Electrical can be chased in afterward with basic tools. Grooves and boxes tuck in cleanly, then everything disappears under the final stucco layer.

How They Make It Strong

The wall becomes a composite—aircrete in the middle, fiberglass-reinforced stucco inside and out. Think surfboard logic: light core, tough skins, and shapes like arches that do a lot of structural heavy lifting.

Aircrete shows up in big jobs too, like rooftop fills and industrial projects, but the real breakthrough here is a small, portable foam generator that lets regular people make it anywhere. It’s light, cheap, and produces plenty of foam for a real build.

Dome and arch shells are where this shines. Straight walls work too with a few concrete pillars or a simple frame, and the aircrete fills in as insulation and structure.

The numbers land around R-1.8 to R-2.2 per inch depending on density, which isn’t foam-board level, but the thermal mass and sound dampening stack up nicely in a thicker wall.

Where This Actually Works

It holds up in most climates. In hot, dry places, the insulation and thermal mass even out wild day-night swings; in the tropics, it shrugs off mold and pests; in colder zones, thicker walls keep things cozy.

Costs are grounded and predictable: cement dominates the budget, the foaming agent is surprisingly cheap, fiberglass mesh is modest, and stucco layers add the next real chunk. A calculator on the company’s site helps size the whole thing.

Permits can be the tricky bit since aircrete isn’t on the usual approved lists yet. Many builds get through with an engineer’s stamp, and smaller glamping-size domes often slide under permit thresholds.

The Problems That Almost Stop People

The foam has to be right. Batches collapse when the foam is off spec or when minerals in the water mess with it, and cold weather can throw it too—warm water fixes a lot of that. Once dialed in, the results get very consistent.

There’s still honest work involved—hauling cement bags, learning a new process, fielding skeptical looks. But it’s all teachable, and the learning curve flattens fast with a few good mixes.

The Father-and-Son Mission Behind It

Domegaia started with Joel’s father, Hajjar, chasing a big problem: how to make permanent, beautiful homes people can actually afford. Marrying domes with aircrete turned that idea into a practical system.

Now the team runs workshops all over, partnering with landowners who host and supply materials while students learn by building a real structure. Everyone leaves with hands-on experience and a finished shell on the land.

There’s a steady flow of guides, a free ebook, and courses online, while engineers, architects, and labs keep pushing for better data and easier approvals. The work keeps moving.