NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — Having sat in one too many hot cars in his life, Shiva Vencat decided on the kind of vacation home he would build here 15 years ago, up a winding road at the foot of the Shawangunk Mountains.

“You leave your car in the sun, it becomes a furnace,” Mr. Vencat said in a phone interview from France. “So what do people do? They move it to the shade. You can’t do that with your home. Or so I thought.”

In the mid-1990s, Mr. Vencat, a Manhattan commodities investor, was on another business trip in France when he read about a remarkable home in Brittany.

It was a 14-foot-wide dome made of curved wooden beams, a cross between a giant paper lantern and an igloo. Built in a Czech factory, the home was earthquake and hurricane resistant as well as energy efficient. But what interested Mr. Vencat most was a feature even more unusual than the shape: The home could spin.