Jack Ramey, 69, a retired technical supervisor at the station, said he had fond memories of the Operational Room, the size of a football field, where he and his colleagues, many of them retired military personnel, worked in jackets and ties in front of control panels. The highlight of his career, he said, was being able to listen to astronauts on a mission, and he recalled the fleeting “concern” in the voices of the Apollo 10 crew members in May 1969 as they scoped out the moon in anticipation of the first landing by Apollo 11 that summer.

Mr. Bullis set up an adjoining room as an indoor shooting range, stacking it with hay bales for target practice with a variety of weapons, including his prized .375 H&H Magnum. “You name it, we’ve shot it,” he said.

He mostly lives in Redwood City, Calif., between San Francisco and San Jose. The home that Mr. Bullis built there is a replica of a stone manor house that he had admired in Bayonne, France. He had planned to make the earth station his weekend home, and he tweaked the dish’s position from a right angle to a position parallel to the ground so that it looks like it is levitating by the structure.

He hoped to transform the operations center into a living room and master bedroom separated by a circular fire pit, and hired R. Wayne Johnson, a local architect and engineer, to reimagine the place as a home.

Mr. Johnson said “it’s a very stable building,” with a five-foot reinforced-concrete roof and double layers of reinforced steel. “We envisioned a flow between interior and exterior,” he added, including the use of folding glass panels that would lead to an outdoor dining area overlooking chardonnay grape vineyards.