Another man, Dean Meadows, who lives nearby on old family land, said: “Spend that much money, people are going to talk. Just stories.
“But people around here sure were curious seeing that thing go up.”
Huff grew up in the small Missouri town of Brunswick and first came to the Ozarks when he was 10.
His parents had taken the family to Silver Dollar City. He attended Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and then California Institute of Technology, where he received a master’s in physics.
After leaving the CIA, he started a company in 1993 that developed software to analyze satellite imagery. After selling the company, the plan was to slow down, but that didn’t work out.
“My dad is too curious about things,” Susan Huff said.
He bought TF Concrete Forming Systems, which uses an aggregate mixed with tiny, thin, twisted strands of high-tensile wire called Helix. Huff says the Helix makes concrete less vulnerable to high winds and explosive blasts. Walls would bend rather than break and then flex back into place.
After retiring, again, he bought 600 acres between Springfield and Branson and began planning Pensmore. He searched for ideas among the great mansions of France and England.
The exterior walls, 12 inches thick, use a foam substance for further insulation. Pipes within the walls carry hot water throughout the house in cold weather and cold water to cool the house in summer.
On top the house is 4,000 square feet of solar panels.
Huff has invited physics and engineering students from Hampden-Sydney to study how the house works and how to improve its efficiency. Students from Drury University and College of the Ozarks also have visited.
So far, the results show the design works, Huff said. Data indicate that heating and cooling systems demanded far less activation for a like-sized building — 88 percent less heating in January and 73 percent less cooling in August.
Huff is convinced the numbers show that concrete is how buildings should be constructed.
“But I’m an inventor, not much of a marketer,” he said.
Coming out of the trees on the drive up the mountain, past the Salers cattle and St. Croix sheep, Pensmore appears like Oz against an Ozark morning sky.
Ralf Augstroze, a media rep, greeted visitors on a recent day. He’s known Huff for years, back, he said, to their time together at the CIA.
“This a house,” Augstroze said. “But it’s also a lot more.”
Different for sure. Inside the unfinished main house, signs direct workers and delivery people to various floors and wings. Handy. The house has five floors, several elevators, 13 bedrooms —including five suites with kitchens — and 14 baths.
All the concrete molds are being made in the basement, which during construction is essentially a factory. The house currently looks like concrete gray, but when “cladding” is complete, it will resemble native stone like an old English mansion.
The house has a music room, telescope observatory, several reading rooms, hobby room and a museum.
The main kitchen measures 40 by 60 feet. That’s 2,400 square feet — almost as big as the median new home sold in the U.S.
On a recent tour, Huff, whom Augstroze described as “an early riser and a night owl,” spent far more time talking about energy efficiency than opulence.
That’s how the tour came to an end, on the open roof surrounded by solar panels and just above nine tons of batteries.
Huff broke away from the energy talk to point out the Ossabaw Island hogs in the woods below. He told about how Spanish explorers brought the breed to the New World and left the hogs on an island off the Georgia coast.
“Very healthy meat,” he said, a slight, cool breeze blowing across the roof a hundred or so feet above the ground, with magnificent views all around, and from all around, views back at the house on the mountain.
Some day this place will be done and it will be normal, part of the landscape.
