With the name thing firmly resolved (!) work was frantic to get them finished in time for the start of the season.
And progress was fantastic. Inspirational. Liberating even. The domes and the central, circular yin and yang en-suite were all rising beautifully out of the ground.
It was hard work, mind you, and there was a lot of blood, sweat and occasionally tears. Although Builder Ken always reckoned it was mostly blood, as we fought to cut wild shapes in the edges of the steel lathe which lacerated our fingers and smacked us in the head every time we stood up.
We spiked straw bales and filled fans of steel with concrete to support seamless curves on tiny timber posts, to create shells of concrete, that were impossibly thin, across spans that, by rights, should have needed far, far more engineering and a lot more material than we were using.
But above all, the weather was with us…
(We always used to say that, on various architectural TV shows we worked on, before the rain suddenly came down.)
And then the rain suddenly came down!
What had started out as a simple solution, designed to be easier and more interesting than the canvas or PVC and steel domes we had been making, was now mired in mud and bad weather. The straw bases that would support the three domes were becoming damper by the minute and the special mix of lightweight concrete over the roofs turned out to be porous.
Things were becoming a little more involved than we expected. And as the spring wore on there was the awful sight of holiday guests trundling suitcases down paths, past labourers with wheelbarrows full of concrete slopping over the edge.
With only a couple of weeks to go before they were finished we reluctantly mothballed the whole project for the season..