What it is

The home inside the sun

Instead of covering one wall, the Solarship encloses the whole building in the solar-passive arch. The gap between the house and the shell becomes a tempered buffer — warmed by winter sun, shaded in summer, and sheltered from wind, snow and driving rain all year.

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A house within a house

The tempered air layer around the home cuts heat loss on every wall and the roof at once — not just the sunny side.

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Maximum solar gain

The full arch captures far more winter sun than a single-wall Solarium, doing the most of any Sophab to displace fuel-burning heat.

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Toward net-negative carbon

Wrap a home you already own in free solar heat and it becomes one of the lowest-carbon places to live — no new house required.

What the buffer actually looks like

Model view of a Solarship from the end: the arch springs from the ground on both sides and rises to a point, with the gable end of an ordinary house standing inside it and a person at the doorway for scale — **The house keeps its own shape.** Nothing about the building inside changes — the arch simply stands clear of it on every side, and the end of the shell is where you walk in. A model view, not a built project.

Model view from inside the buffer, standing between the house and the shell: the home's windowed wall on the left, the open-web timber ribs curving overhead and down the right-hand side, a person for scale — **The gap is the room.** This is the tempered layer the panels above describe — wide enough to walk down, with the house's own windows opening into it. The ribs are drawn bare here to show the structure; in use they carry the glazing.

Where it stands

Engineered, and looking for its first site

No Solarship has been built yet. The Sophab Arch it is made of has — at solarium scale, on a home here in Fredericton — and the engineering behind the full-sized shell is real work rather than a sketch: a symmetric full-arch analysis under NBCC 2015 loads, a rib section calibrated to the span, and a foundation sized on the reactions that analysis returns.

What's missing is a first project. We're looking for that, and for local community projects interested in applying solar-passive technology at this scale.

Invest & partner →

A Solarship — a free-standing glazed arch enclosing a whole house, with the timber ribs reading through the polycarbonate — Visualisation of a Solarship — not a photograph of a built project.

How it's built

The same arch, engineered up

The Solarship uses the same locally fabricated timber ribs and polycarbonate glazing as the smaller Sophabs — just scaled up and engineered for the loads of a full-home span.

It can be paired with earth tubes to pre-temper the air the home breathes, and internal shades to fine-tune summer comfort — a complete solar-passive system.

Size and price one →

The Solarship — 3D model of a whole home in a dome

Not only houses

One shell, three things to live in

A Solarship does not have to wrap a house. At 22 ft across and 18 ft to the crown — a 37 ft long shell on nine bays of rib — it wraps a unit: a tiny home, a travel trailer, or nothing at all but a deck and a couple of tents. The interesting cases are the small dwellings that already exist and are only really comfortable for four months of the year.

What the shell adds is the same in all three: a dry, frost-free room around the thing you already own, walls that stop seeing wind and rain, and a shoulder season at both ends of the summer. What it is not is the dwelling. Everything inside keeps its own roof, its own walls and its own front door.

A tiny home inside it

A small Solarship on a gravel pad with a gabled tiny home standing inside it, timber ribs and polycarbonate glazing arching over the unit, its wood-stove flue rising out through the shell — **The unit keeps its own roof.** The shell is a rain screen and a wind break, not a waterproof layer over a bedroom — so the tiny home under it is a complete building, standing clear of the ribs by about 0.85 m at its eaves with 1.8 m of air over its ridge.

Inside the shell beside the tiny home: its windows and wall to one side, the glazed arch overhead, a growing bed along the sunny flank and the far end's door beyond — **The gap becomes a room.** A growing bed down the sunny flank, firewood staying dry against the ribs, and a covered entrance — the buffer is the part you actually use.

A travel trailer parked in it

The same small Solarship with a white travel trailer parked inside it on levelling blocks, wheels on, the tow vehicle on the track outside — **No fit-out at all.** The trailer tows in, levels up on its blocks and stays a trailer — wheels on, jacks down. The shell is worth more *because* it can leave again: a seasonal site, a dry bay over winter, a rental that tows out.

Inside the shell alongside the trailer's door, looking down the length to a decked sitting area at the glazed far end — **The awning stays rolled up.** It cannot open in here, and it has nothing to do — the shell is the awning. What the trailer gains instead is covered ground: a deck at the far end, and a way in that is never wet.

Or a shore, a deck and two tents

A small Solarship on a lakeshore at dusk, screened at both ends, festoon lights along the ribs and two tents pitched on the deck inside, a dock and a fire ring in front of it — **The cheapest version is still the product.** Screened at both ends, glazed to the sky, on a shore: rain off, bugs out, and warm enough to sit in long after the season for sitting outside has finished.

Inside the lakeside shell: two dome tents pitched on an open-jointed timber deck, a picnic table, string lights along the ribs, the screened end and the water beyond — **Tents on a deck, not on the ground.** You cannot peg into a deck, so these are free-standing domes on a weighted footprint — and a groundsheet laid straight on gravel is where the condensation ends up.

Three details in these pictures are not styling. The crown vent is open in every one of them: a small glazed shell with someone inside it is a solar collector with a person in it, and the ridge slot is the outlet that keeps it habitable. At least one end is a screen, never glass, because that is where the cross ventilation comes from — and it is the difference between camping in it and looking at it. And the shell has its own door, on the end the unit's door faces: it now wraps that door and those windows, so it has to be on the same way out. Cooking and fire stay at the open end or outside altogether.

These are renders straight out of the same parametric model that produces the drawings — the ribs, the glazing offsets and the section are the ones we build. Nothing on this page has been built yet.

Size and price a small one →

A whole home in a dome.