He built underground maze of light-filled earth homes in CA Sierras

I know people that are paying $300, $600 a month in utilities just to heat or cool a house. That's crazy. Rather than just spending the extra $800 to insulate a house properly. Nor, like what we're doing, insulate the house itself. Not the actual shell, but around the house by nesting it or integrating it more into the earth. Hi. I like your trees. Hi, nice to meet you. Wow, right away. It feels like a little kind of fairy tale. Like it doesn't feel like a house. All right, careful though. I barely trained this one. It's taking a nip or two, the more curious. You were getting into a sort of another world here, right? Yeah. The vision of this property is a 17-year work about how inexpensively we can build for the climate and for the exposure to these new firestorms and other elements. Bunkers have been around, but those things are dark. They're mega expensive. They suffer from mold and lack of ventilation. And the same with earthships. Those are practical in a desert environment. You'd be growing mold as a second agricultural crop if you tried to build an earthship here the way they do. So this idea here is really about how do you take the simple wood frame modular design and then encapsulate it like a turtle shell in a way that you have this ooey-gooey, warm, nurturing living space that's inexpensive and very familiar, that's well insulated, that benefits from the standard benefits of the earth, which is around 65 degrees. So the trick is all this stuff you see is my exploring the craft of ferrocement. So we designed this so that it feels kind of welcoming and opening. We didn't want it to feel like it was dark and forbidding. And so you can see there's a lot of openings here that kind of allow air and light. And then on this side here, we also incorporated little atriums as well. And these have both electric lights as well as natural skylights that go up into the garden above. The idea is how do you create kind of, you know, what is the guy's name? Forstier. Forstier, yeah. He also created this hive of connected spaces. And I'm a little more cheap because he burrowed in the earth. I'm actually creating a space and then like every area I don't use, I have to fill with gravel or something. So I want to incorporate and use every single space here. So that was a big difference. But you can kind of see how this feels nice and open and light. And then we've got these atriums in here and over here. So it kind of Swiss cheeses this experience. Oh, it is like Forstier with the bed, putting beds in kind of the nooks, right? Yeah, this is called an apse. And it's just kind of like a little sleeping niche. And so if you have guests and you need like a little private place for someone to crash or whatever, this is going to be my office space. I really wanted to be able to look out into the garden. So this is Allison and I kind of worked out our control issues like she got one room and I got one room. So this is the same size lancet dome, but she built her sleeping niche right next to the garden. It's just big enough for it's like a twin size bed against lean against this wall and look out at the garden. So this is called a lancet dome. And lancet domes are one of the strongest and oldest structural forms. So the thing with the lancet dome is the diameter is also the radius. Normally the radius is in the middle of a dome. But in this case, it's the opposing floor at the wall. Okay, so it's like this, right? So it's like two radiuses. So if we anchored from there 12 feet, this would be 12 feet. This is 12 feet all the way up. Is that geometry creating the extra endurance? Yeah, that shape is super strong. And there's a bunch of different heritage shapes. But the question is, is can you mass produce it? Will it fit on a shelf on a box, you know, in Home Depot. And that's what drives our architecture. It's no longer craft, right? It's not like me going, Hmm, seems like you got a lot of rock here. Maybe we should build a rock house. And as a builder, I tend to like do things that are acceptable and engineerable, right? Because part of this is permitting. We want people to build to get homes built, not like fight the government for three years trying to get a permit for like a straw mail house. But ferrocement has been part of the international building codes for 100 years. It has its own chapter. And it runs almost like a 10th of the cost compared to concrete. Here we're going into our grotto space. Like in Europe and stuff, you have like all these, like you'll have a house and they'll have like a 25 foot, eight inch thick concrete wall adjacent to sidewalk. You go into this door and you enter this lush environment, right? And so the idea here is that the main house looks out into the view scape and the canyon and the backside looks into this private space. So you still have air that can go all the way through the house and ventilation. And then this is just like an amazing, private, fun space to hang out. Well, I tell you in the summertime, when I'm working outside doing construction, being able to come down into here, it's like so nice. It's just like a complete retreat. And it's just, most people don't, it's like crazy. Like, wait a minute, standing right there, it's 115. It's hard to imagine that there's this heat envelope that the heat does not come down. You know, you can have all the benefits of light and air and not suffer the heat. And it's passive. This is all solid earth around, and that acts as a big energy bank, right? And because there's no direct light heating the space other than a little spot right over there, there's no solar game, right? So it just radiates this consistent, comfortable temperature. And how did you get it so you have these sort of rounded ceiling? What's the support? Is there an arch type thing or what's the structure? The structure is all made out of, you create what's called a false works, and that's like a more rectangular, temporary structure. So it has a grid of, this one has half inch rebar on 12 inch on center, and then slab mesh, which is like a welded wire panel, like eighth inch thick, and then expanded metal lath attached to that with a fiber enriched plaster, and then shotcrete on the back. Ferrocement is really awesome because you fairly quickly can define structural components that'll shape the vision of what you're trying to do. You're looking at three openings into the passage with a door on the left, and this is the actual reality of it. And then the left of that will be a winding stairway up to the terrace itself. Big day today. We bedded and extended all the foundations. This is a sleeping niche, and you kind of see we created the bed platform. This is called twin orb. They'll have a larger six foot orb here in the front. In the back there is a smaller chamber. Inside this darkness, so this is a sleeping niche. This is a planter niche. They have these drains in here. That's a three-quarter inch PVC pipe, and that'll have gravel on top, and then filter fabric, and it'll be filled with dirt. A lot of the underground houses that we're designing and building now work well because they're built into a gentle slope or a hillside. Now this whole thing, it was not a huge amount of slope, so that's why I excavated 500 yards in here. Momentous occasion here, just finishing the water collection liner for around 1,100 square feet of the 2,000 foot terrace, and then we ended up filling with five trailer loads of clean drain rock. The idea is as we were backfilling this thing up to our finished grade, we got to a point to where just around a foot below the grade where we created the shallow basin with the gravel and put waterproofing down, and that collects all the water that lands on here into a three-inch pipe down to a huge 60,000 gallon underground cistern down here. After we put that waterproofing down, we filled everything level with gravel and then put filter fabric, sand, and then these pavers and other structures. So all these cool little garden walls, they're very inexpensive and quick and easy, and obviously you can design and do them like a puzzle piece in any shape you want. But these are the, this is your underground house? These are the underground houses. Yeah, now this is not our house. These are outdoor because they're not conditioned, and so like with the county, they're separating environments that you heat and or cool from like outdoor spaces. One of the nice things is this whole area is a huge benefit to our living space, right? So when we think about like designing and building a space for living, often people are not encouraged to Now all of this 5,000 plus square feet of space that we've created below and above is non-taxable. You don't pay any taxes on this. So it absolutely makes sense to invest in environments where you can hang out without air conditioning outside when it's 115 degrees. Why are they non-taxable? Because they are considered not a dwelling or why? You don't pay annual tax on your landscaping, and the difference between an area outside of your insulated living space, your house, and a space inside is whether it's heated or cooled. So when we go through this house, out of the 700 square foot upper floor, there's only 400 square feet of taxable space. So we're only paying taxes on the environment that we heat and cool. I just last year finally finished this planter and introduced everything. They get enough light? Oh yeah, oh yeah. Because right now you do see they're getting light. Oh yeah. With the spaces that we create, I like to think of it like bubbles, right? And how bubbles come together to create strong structures. And so vaults and circles are just hyper dynamic strong structures. That means that you can build them with very little reinforcement and mass to have them be absolutely strong. Come on Rosie. This whole space down here is designed for my parakeets. I wanted some space where they could fly up and like perch up here and hang out. Shelly's kind of a cage girl. Come on. Climb up. Come on. Come on Shelly. Let's see you fly. No. No. Come on. Come on. You did it. It's just a huge birdcage. It is. Oh yeah. It's so fun to have interactive elements as a part of your living space. So growing down here, nothing special. You just put a couple. Yeah, there's a lot of light here in those passage elements. You need to be a little bit more selective because of the light. But you don't get the frost issues in here that you would outside. So you can actually have more sensitive plants in here than you could outside. So this is what really reminds me of Forestier's gardens, underground gardens, doesn't it? But did you, had you seen it? I haven't been there, but I saw it from you. You did? Okay. Yeah. I mean. Yeah. I imagine like a number of tiny homes with like a whole series of connected underground spaces where maybe there's like a central mound of connected spaces and then each home is looking out into their own perspective, right? You have a bit of that feel because we see a stairwell going off there. There's a, there's a door there. There's a window here. There's a house there. This connects up to the garage and then the, there's a laundry room in here so that both households could share the laundry space. So it really does just connect. Yeah. It's so calm in here. Oh, there's water. And there's water. Yeah. With fish. Yeah. Forestier was also doing that kind of thing. I mean, you don't, and the great thing is they don't still have mud. You do. The structure, a house is, there's practical aspects of boxiness, but you can see I've fought it on this all over. Like this whole wall here gradually arcs into the stairway. That's a tighter arc there. The soft corner of the kitchen. From the straw bale houses I built, this is something I took. I really love like these rounded. It brings the house more light in and, and creates like curves when the roundness on the countertops. And I really like countertops with a character and you either could leave this outside under an Oak tree and it'll do the same thing naturally. Or you can buy organic acids or make your own and then you etch the concrete. That's what we did here. It's just really, it's just really inexpensive. Like all these countertops is probably around $60 of concrete. It's inexpensive if you can do it yourself. Yes. And you do it yourself because you did do it yourself. Yeah. You guys just. Yeah. But if you pay somebody, it's not that. You know, many of us can save half the cost if we can do a lot of the work ourselves. So then you can see no refrigerator. So here we go down the rabbit hole. And then for the deeper, uh, this, this is underground and this is a root cellar. It keeps going. So it's basically a bookshelf behind a bookshelf. We had a hidden bookshelf. I mean, that is, and I'm not, okay, no more bookshelf. That bookshelf doesn't move. We can't show you what's behind this one. We'll come out back in the atrium. Bye guys. Some more bookshelves. Yeah. So a lot of the wood that we used for all the trim and all that stuff all came from three pine trees that we had to cut down when we built the houses. So like all these stairs and all these bookshelves and the trim are all from the pine trees that we milled. And then we had, we cured them for over two and a half years. So we call this the vault house and you can see it has this big vaulted roof and ceiling. And then we actually built all of these glue lamps on the deck right here. And so we actually, there's like 50 clamps all in this huge arc here. And you can see it's like, you know, tensioning these boards one by one into position. We saved $14,000 by doing it ourselves. And so it was a huge benefit. When I was in New Zealand, we stayed with a family there and they brought us down to their school on the weekend and they were adding a couple more buildings to their school and they're building it all themselves. And they were building glue lamps in the parking lot. And I'm like, what? You can build your own glue lamps? And so I decided to take these on. So similar to a lot of the spaces, I tend to like to have like a summer space and a winter space, similar to our underground farmer in Fresno. So in the winter time, this loft space is absolutely luscious. Any heat kind of gravitates up towards the loft area and it's just really nice and snugly. And then we have an outdoor sleeping space in the summertime. So this is where I sleep. So is that the non, is this part the non-taxable one? Yeah, exactly. As well as that space over there. So this is really nice. So this faces east. So I get morning sunlight and it shades first, right? So in the hot summer, as the sun goes around the backside, this stays nice and shaded. So this is really cool right off the bat and it's high enough off the ground that there's no mosquitoes. The idea is in the winter time, this tree loses its leaves and then the nice sun comes in and it heats this wall and that heat stays in this room. So we'll have, we had plants in here. We have a window up in the ceiling that we can put a box fan in and take the warmth from this room into the bedroom over there. Now this is 13 feet underground, but as you can see, most of the house is exposed to the air. How did you get this look, this earthy look? Well, we built custom trowels, right? That we could use to make specific shapes. So we would plaster it on there and then create the texture. And then after it cures, you can come back with an organic patina acid and then do the detail work. So an outdoor bed? Is that like a summer bed? Yeah. Yeah. If you have friends visiting, it's just a real nice place to hang out. A lot of the year you can just sleep outside. I do. Yeah. Now if you met my mom, you'd understand she sleeps outside. She's like 84 years old. What we've really been focusing on now is designs that aren't just aesthetic. They're actually critical to live in a fire ecology and how we can actually develop integrated living spaces with the earth. So you continued on the land here. You continued to build another house? The goal wasn't really to build another house, but I was starting this whole new idea. I built four of these so far. So this was my prototype. Part of the stretch was kind of exploring these ADUs or tiny homes. What our goal here is to create a module insulated space and then these thinner inexpensive surrounding open air spaces. Like you can see here's an atrium. Great. If you can't tell if it's indoors or outdoors, right? It feels like everything's, it's sort of an indoors, but not. It's like a little living room without a roof. Exactly. Yeah. We like it. Oh yeah. And then it just connects to the, uh, the actual, uh, wood framed standard modular house with a flat roof is located right here. And it has like a pond liner over the roof and then a drainage plane. And then only around six inches of planting medium. Okay. So the amount of contributing load or weight on the roof is almost nothing, but the benefit for insulation from the heat is huge. Especially once we get a ground cover on here, because the grass and plants actually stopped the light from hitting the dirt. If it was just dirt, the dirt would warm up. It needs to have a living cover. You don't want a real thick cover. You want something easy to maintain. That's not going to need really deep roots. So if it's four inches to eight inches tall, that's more than enough. By lightly irrigating it, you're keeping your whole roof cool during the summer with very little material or load to the structure. And we'll go in through the main door. What I love about the ferro cement is it's so fluid in its composition and allows you to work around existing landscape features like these trees and stuff like that. You know, this is like a huge investment to have a plant grow this big in your living space is a lot of years of time. And so to be able to work around and incorporate your living in existing trees and shrubs is an awesome option. Now in this particular build, I was kind of working around this oak grove here. So that was kind of fun to pivot the space around. And then the idea is the fire would come from this direction. Prevailing winds come from the west, going uphill is going towards the east. Fires are either going to come up the canyon behind you or come up over the top here. Now, similar to Europe, you know, often the entries would be like really kind of narrow so they could defend them, right? Through me, mate! Well, this is fire defense, right? Another kind of defense. Modern worries. So we did, this is the first one we did like this. And this has this like layer of faux stone revealed under the plaster is kind of what we're going for. But really it just allowed us to plaster this because one of the challenges in doing these larger services is the controlled breaks are where you stop and start and those will create a very visual blemish, right? And so by being able to do this lower one, the middle one, and then the top one, we're able to do the whole thing concurrently. So there's no roof. Is that a problem? Not at all. No, this is great. Like in our, even on our bigger one, when we've had like a foot of snow, you know, might get a little bit of snow in the middle area, but it goes away quickly. So in the winter time, yeah, you probably don't want to be outside. And that's why we have like a super insulated nest base. But in the rest of the year, which is probably nine months of the year, you have a space that's both warmer in the winter and cooler in the summertime. And most importantly, kind of more alive and vibrant and fresh, you know, no off gassing. You can hear the birds. And then we have a little sleeping niche here. And again, you know, just so that like when it's hot in the summertime, you could actually go and sleep outside where it's nice and cool. And then we have a little bathroom. Now this one has a composting toilet with just a little sink. Again, these are all spaces that don't need to be heated. So they're outside of the insulated envelope. This is the insulated envelope in here. Okay. So like this pantry does not need to be insulated. And you can feel it's nice and cool in here. This one has a little hidden room back in here. Storage? Yeah. Lumber for this size place is around $2,000 for all the lumber. And so, you know, people can kind of get into a space fairly inexpensively and then develop it. This is what we built first. So this became completely watertight. And then we expanded and added the armature and the other stuff, right? First step, create the clean living environment. This is the Murphy bed. You just bought one off the shelf? Yeah, I had that for a while. I'm like, I better use this. Why not? Because that takes up a lot of this. It's so small. Totally. Yeah. So again, what we're trying to do is create this envelope all around the wood framed house. So there was a need because the dirt level is at the bottom of that round opening right there. And so there's like nine feet of dirt fill that we don't want against the wood framed house. So we created here is this little atrium that's got planters in here for more vines and stuff to grow. So it just kind of gives a sense of the space being larger. But on a practical level, it's keeping the moisture and the dirt and everything away from the living space. So all around the whole house here on three sides, there are spaces that protects the house from being burdened by the dirt or moisture. And that's the real trick to the whole thing. Because otherwise, like the biggest problem with nesting a house is ventilation, natural lighting and moisture. And then the spaces that are surrounding are just spaces like things that don't need to be heated. Like in the old days, insulation was and so all the houses were made into these lots of little rooms because you only heated like one small room. And so if you're going to have part of your house like this is the place we retreat when it's cold, what can we sacrifice? What doesn't need to be in that space? Shower and greenhouse. In process. This is kind of a cool area over here. You can kind of see how we flare and roll around the plants and stuff like that. It does feel part of the landscape. Whole series. So there are quite a few people that want these kind of homes. I think there's going to be way more. I mean, who wants to go in debt for their whole life and raise a family in a home that gets burned down? And so just to not be more thoughtful about how we live in this kind of environment where fires have been a part of the ecology for thousands of years. What burns down houses is the windows. It's not the actual heat. It's the radiation that you feel that you have to stand back from. So here there's no windows. And this is recess. So if a fire is coming up, the radiant energy is going to hit this. Now, normally in my designs, this space, whatever this distance is right here, three times going out this way. We want that fire held back. That radiant heat then has no direct line of sight to the plastic windows. The topography of the landscape here was really intense, right? Straight up. And so the goal here was to have a view looking into the local canyon, but also to be able to access the only reasonable area we could park. And these are called sail walls here. And this particular one creates a privacy screen, but they also provide a fire stop. A lot of the fires we're experiencing are these wind driven fires. So it's not just the fire, it's the wind. And so you want to create defensible space by blocking the radiant energy. And this is like a super, super cheap way to create your first layer of defensible space around your house. When we moved onto this property, it was a wild land. It was all overgrown. We had just enough money to buy the raw land from this guy I ended up befriending. And then Allison and I moved into a tent and then built this place. When we got ready to build this house, we were just going to build an apartment over a garage. And like two weeks before I was due to pour the foundation, I got the courage to ask Allison whether I could add a tower. And so this tower came out of the blue. Allison is like an amazing salvager. We built probably like 40% of this house with salvage material. We actually disassembled one of our friend's clients. He was a property manager, was tearing down a $4 million house, and we had two days with a sawzall to take whatever we want. This house is built into the hillside seven feet. And we're building in a really intense landscape, so that made sense for us. But it ended up saving us because when we built this, there were people who weren't entirely inspired by my ideas. And they actually red-tagged the project because it was too tall. And luckily after reading the fine print, I found out that the measurement from the rooftop maximum measurement was the average between the highest average grade of earth and the lowest. And so I had three and a half feet, which brought me like nine inches under the legal limit. So it ended up being my like, yes, thank god I buried that house a little bit. This is one of the first ferro, so you can kind of see there's like these little, all these little details that you can put into these. All the structures being pleated, elements like this, it's really a fun medium to work with. You're stepping into kind of a tree. It feels a bit right, rounded by limbs. Actually we're going to start ducking into the garage first. And then this is my office space. This stays super cool in the summertime. It feels like you're inside of a trunk or something. Yeah, head of light and half. But this is all just expanded metal and like hot mud. This is nothing too crazy as far as elaborate proprietary mixes. Casey and Amanda are artists who are working this house out. And then we're going to come into the main living space. This is actually a hidden bookcase door in case you need to run out of the house suddenly for some strange reason. Wow, look at that round window. Was that difficult to put in a round window? It was a skylight. Oh really? Yeah. And what happened? We made it into a window. Oh, so you're just working with what you had. Yeah, you can kind of see in the house across over there, there was another one from the other house. This is where Allison's favorite room is. And so that's kind of like the little, we call it the bird nest. But this is a bed. I mean, it's a bedroom. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's great. Gosh, this is the hardest ladder I think I've ever climbed. OK, this is you're pushing it with this ladder. You really have to grab all the. That's a cozy space. It's just the size of a queen mattress. Yeah, again, it's that whole cheapness, not wanting to waste space. Plus, this was meant to be kind of a studio build. And so having like an extra little private sleeping space seemed like it was a good idea. Yeah. Goodness. Then also, we didn't know about the concept of counter depth refrigerators. So when we designed this kitchen, the fridge came out to here and that doesn't work. So we put it in the pantry. And so it's kind of hidden. It's not. Oh, my gosh. It's not a it's a bookshelf. Yeah. Yeah. So then you've hidden away what you don't really want to see. Yeah. It's a small house, you know. So we did what we could. This is Allison's original master control hub. Right. I was relegated down into the basement, missing to the washing machine. She's up here with the surround music. All right. Oh, let me show you the this is the widow's walk. Now I built this. That's great. Yeah. And then this is just, you know, a really beautiful spot, especially in the wintertime. As you can tell, it's nice and sunny. We're not Rapunzel yet. I mean, you have to be a little higher, right? Like I do. It goes higher. This does feel like some fairy tale. No, we got the Rapunzel thing happening a lot. Yeah. Her hair used to be a little longer. Yeah. So this is the tower room and that looks east at the rising sun, has a nice clawfoot tub and a walk in closet. And then this amazing place to sleep up in this loft. And then the funny part is that this used to have a flat roof, used to have a parapet roof, a concrete roof with a three foot railing all the way around. This used to be the ceiling of this tower space. And then we had a trap door and you could go up onto this roof and we had like this amazing view and like we just never used the space. And we decided like let's just turn this thing into a conical roof and then we can do this beautiful, beautiful spherical ceiling. This becomes kind of too hot in the summertime up here because all the heat goes. And so that's where we created this outdoor sleeping deck here. The summertime, you sleep outside there and come up here in the wintertime when all the heat kind of naturally goes up. We grew the Boston Ivy also to kind of keep the heat from hitting the stucco of the building and that seemed to help. The idea was to help keep the plants watered and cool in the summertime so that those living plants would shade the house and not have the sun have such an impact. So this is, have you heard of commercial living walls where they take, you know, all the plants on the wall, right? Well, this is my more sustainable version of it. I call it a living well. And so the idea here is that in the summertime, this is all going to be plumbed with misters. So cool, moist air will drop and that'll bring the smell of all these flowers and nice moist air down into the atrium below. Water is such a critical thing in California, especially. Echo! So for a corrugated 30-foot diameter tank, it was $75,000 to $80,000 for this water capacity. I built this for $8,000. And then this has a unique design. It's shaped like a donut. Most of the larger corrugated metal tanks, the roof structure goes from one side all the way over to the other side. And by having this central column, it makes the structure need to be less strong, less expensive to build. And it's also fun to swim in and sing. Allison's friend went down there who's a professional singer. You actually swim in there? I used to swim in there all the time, until I found a snake. This is the original cabin. We slept outside. This is what you lived in at the beginning? No, we actually lived on an elevated deck with one of those mosquito nettings. But we had the kitchen and our like inside hang space here. So that way you could just live on the land while you're building? Yeah. Oh, it's a full kitchen. Yeah, so we had pulled the bed out and put a table in and had it so if it was bad weather, we could come inside and have a place to cook food and stuff that wasn't outside. It was the original thing that was here. This guy and his wife and they brought their kids up here and they would have their... Oh my gosh, it's almost like a camper or something. And then you bought it and lived in it. You just felt like it was enough. Well, while we were building the other house. How long? It was around seven months. Seven months. Yeah. Yeah. Summertime. No winter. When it started to rain, it was kind of hard to sleep outside. And we had bears and skunks and all kinds of visitors. We woke up one night and I'm like, what is Allison eating? And it's just this loud crunching. The bear had gotten into a bag that we had near our bed with some tortellini. He's sitting there and he's like one by one, just like he's watching TV, staring at us eating tortellini. So I just finished this last year. This is really a fun project. I really, as you can tell, got a little thing going on around towers. This is a fun little gargoyle. It's got a parapet roof. So the water pours out of that when it rains or you can sleep upside. Yeah. But we kind of visualize it as a place where you could work on plants and things like that. But the ceiling is a massive water tank. Right. And so when we have a power outage in the past, Aki would have to carry five gallon pails of water up for Allison to go pee. So now I can just open this door and turn one simple valve. Right. And then all the gravity stored water up here will charge the system. So there's a water tank where in front. Yeah. Right from the ceiling here to the top. To the top. So you were saying something about sleeping? There's a deck on top. People sleep on the deck on top. Yeah. There's a ladder. It goes right over here. So you can sleep up top. Uh-huh. Fun. There's our little tree house down there. My daughter and I had built that when she was eight years old. She's 37 now. This was our big addition to the property. We're like, oh my God, we need our own eggs. So that was built out of salvaged wood from a historic house that we're working on. And then this, you know, the 500 yards of dirt that we dug out from over there, we ended up designing this whole terrace. These lids here are for what those huge 2,700 gallon poly tanks. And then there's a little room that you can go down inside here to access the bulk works and other plumbing. Like all our well water goes here. Right. Goes up there first, then it goes into here. So this keeps it nice and cold. And then the cistern is all of the rain water. Character to me is something that just happens as a part of the process of crafting. Function is really what we want to focus on. And right now we just have no way to explore alternative things than these homogenized cracker boxes that they sell us from Home Depot or whatever.