Jon duSaint, a retired software engineer, recently bought property near Bishop, Calif., in a rugged valley east of the Sierra Nevada. The area is at risk for wildfires, severe daytime heat and high winds — and also heavy winter snowfall.

But Mr. duSaint isn’t worried. He’s planning to live in a dome.

The 29-foot structure will be coated with aluminum shingles that reflect heat, and are also fire-resistant. Because the dome has less surface area than a rectangular house, it’s easier to insulate against heat or cold. And it can withstand high winds and heavy snowpack.

“The dome shell itself is basically impervious,” Mr. duSaint said.

As weather grows more extreme, geodesic domes and other resilient home designs are gaining new attention from more climate-conscious home buyers, and the architects and builders who cater to them.

The trend could begin to dislodge the inertia that underlies America’s struggle to adapt to climate change: Technologies exist to protect homes against severe weather — but those innovations have been slow to seep into mainstream homebuilding, leaving most Americans increasingly exposed to climate shocks, experts say.

Riding out the storm

In the atrium of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, students from the Catholic University of America recently finished reassembling “Weatherbreak,” a geodesic dome built more than 70 years ago and briefly used as a home in the Hollywood Hills. It was avant-garde at the time: roughly a thousand aluminum struts bolted together into a hemisphere, 25 feet high and 50 feet wide, evoking an oversize metal igloo.

The structure, designed by Jeffrey Lindsay and inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller, has gained new relevance as the Earth warms.

“We started thinking about how our museum can respond to climate change,” Abeer Saha, the curator who oversaw the dome’s reconstruction, said. “Geodesic domes popped out as a way that the past can offer a solution for our housing crisis, in a way that hasn’t really been given enough attention.”

Domes are just one example of the innovation underway. Houses made from steel and concrete can be more resilient to heat, wildfire and storms. Even traditional wood-framed homes can be constructed in ways that greatly reduce the odds of severe damage from hurricanes or flooding.

But the costs of added resiliency can be about 10 percent higher than conventional construction. That premium, which often pays for itself through reduced repair costs after a disaster, nonetheless poses a problem: Most home buyers don’t know enough about construction to demand tougher standards. Builders, in turn, are reluctant to add resilience, for fear that consumers won’t be willing to pay extra for features they don’t understand.

One way to bridge that gap would be to tighten building codes, which are set at the state and local level. But most places don’t use the latest code, if they have any mandatory building standards at all.

Some architects and designers are responding on their own to growing concerns about disasters.

On a piece of land that juts out in the Wareham River, near Cape Cod, Mass., Dana Levy is watching his new fortress of a house go up. The structure will be built with insulated concrete forms, or ICF, creating walls that can withstand high winds and flying debris, and also maintain stable temperatures if the power goes out — which is unlikely to happen, thanks to the solar panels, backup batteries and emergency generator. The roof, windows, and doors will be hurricane-resistant.

The whole point, according to Mr. Levy, a 60-year-old retiree who worked in renewable energy, is to ensure he and his wife won’t have to leave the next time a big storm hits.

“There’s going to be a lot of people spilling out into the street seeking sparse government resources,” Mr. Levy said. His goal is to ride out the storm, “and in fact invite my neighbors over.”

Mr. Levy’s new home was designed by Illya Azaroff, a New York architect who specializes in resilient designs, with projects in Hawaii, Florida and the Bahamas. Mr. Azaroff said using that type of concrete frame adds 10 to 12 percent to the cost of a home. To offset that extra cost, some of his clients, including Mr. Levy, opt to make their new home smaller than planned — sacrificing an extra bedroom, say, for a greater chance of surviving a disaster.

Building with steel

Where wildfire risk is great, some architects are turning to steel. In Boulder, Colo., Renée del Gaudio designed a house that uses a steel structure and siding for what she calls an ignition-resistant shell. The decks are made from ironwood, a fire-resistant lumber. Beneath the decks and surrounding the house is a weed barrier topped by crushed rock, to prevent the growth of plants that could fuel a fire. A 2,500-gallon cistern could supply water for hoses in case a fire gets too close.

Those features increased the construction costs as much as 10 percent, according to Ms. del Gaudio. That premium could be cut in half by using cheaper materials, like stucco, which would provide a similar degree of protection, she said.

Ms. del Gaudio had reason to use the best materials. She designed the house for her father.

But perhaps no type of resilient home design inspires devotion quite like geodesic domes. In 2005, Hurricane Rita devastated Pecan Island, a small community in southwest Louisiana, destroying most of the area’s few hundred houses.

Joel Veazey’s 2,300-square-foot dome was not one of them. He only lost a few shingles.

“People came to my house and apologized to me and said: ‘We made fun of you because of the way your house looks. We should never have done that. This place is still here, when our homes are gone,’” Mr. Veazey, a retired oil worker, said.

Dr. Max Bégué lost his house near New Orleans to Hurricane Katrina. In 2008, he built and moved into a dome on the same property, which has survived every storm since, including Hurricane Ida.

Two features give domes their ability to withstand wind. First, the domes are composed of many small triangles, which can carry more load than other shapes. Second, the shape of the dome channels wind around it, depriving that wind of a flat surface to exert force on.

“It doesn’t blink in the wind,” Dr. Bégué, a racehorse veterinarian, said. “It sways a little bit — more than I want it to. But I think that’s part of its strength.”

‘Looking for something different’

Mr. Veazey and Dr. Bégué got their homes from Natural Spaces Domes, a Minnesota company that has seen demand jump the past two years, according to Dennis Odin Johnson, who owns the company with his wife Tessa Hill. He said he expected to sell 30 or 40 domes this year, up from 20 last year, and has had to double his staff.

The typical dome is about 10 to 20 percent less than expensive to build than a standard wood-frame house, Mr. Johnson said, with total construction costs in the range of $350,000 to $450,000 in rural areas, and about 50 percent higher in and around cities.

Most customers aren’t particularly wealthy, Mr. Johnson said, but have two things in common: an awareness of climate threats, and an adventurous streak.

“They want something that’s going to last,” he said. “But they are looking for something different.”

One of Mr. Johnson’s newer clients is Katelyn Horowitz, a 34-year-old accounting consultant who is building a dome in Como, Colo. She said she was drawn by the ability to heat and cool the dome’s interior more efficiently than other structures, and the fact that they require less material than traditional homes.

“I like quirky,” Ms. Horowitz said, “but I love sustainable.”

At his office near the Empire State Building, Rex Heuermann was a master of the meticulous: a veteran architectural consultant and a self-styled expert at navigating the intricacies of New York City’s building code. He impressed some clients and drove others crazy with his fine-toothed directives.

At home in Massapequa Park on Long Island, while some neighbors saw Mr. Heuermann as just another commuter in a suit, others found him a figure of menace. He glowered at neighbors while swinging an ax in the front yard of a low-slung, dilapidated house that parents cautioned their children to avoid on Halloween. He was kicked out of a Whole Foods for stealing fruit.

“We would cross the street,” said Nicholas Ferchaw, 24, a neighbor. “He was somebody you don’t want to approach.”

On Friday, Suffolk County prosecutors said that residents of Massapequa Park had a serial killer living in their midst. They accused Mr. Heuermann, 59, of leaving a quarter-mile trail of young women’s bodies on the South Shore of Long Island in what came to be known as the Gilgo Beach Killings. Yet he was so careful in covering his tracks, they said, that it took them nearly 15 years to arrest him.

Mr. Heuermann’s friends and clients in the real estate business were flabbergasted.

His neighbor Mr. Ferchaw said, “I wasn’t surprised at all — because of all the creepiness.”

Mr. Heuermann, who was arrested in Midtown on Thursday night, was charged Friday with three counts of first-degree murder and ordered held without bail during a brief appearance at a courthouse in Suffolk County. His lawyer said outside the courthouse that Mr. Heuermann denied committing the killings.

If convicted of these crimes, Mr. Heuermann would join the ranks of serial killers who led double lives, the other one quite mundane. John Wayne Gacy was a construction contractor in Illinois. Richard Cottingham, known as the Torso Killer, was a computer operator for a New Jersey insurance company.

In a video interview posted on YouTube last year and conducted at his entirely unremarkable-looking office on Fifth Avenue, Mr. Heuermann — tall and heavyset, sporting a toupee-like 1970s haircut and a blue dress shirt with a pen peeking from the pocket — comes across as a recognizable character: the scrappy, street-smart Noo Yawker, the I-got-a-guy guy.

“When a job that should have been routine suddenly becomes not routine,” he tells the interviewer, Antoine Amira, “I get the phone call.”

According to his résumé and the website of his company, RH Consultants & Associates, Mr. Heuermann’s customers included American Airlines, Catholic Charities, and the city’s own Department of Environmental Protection. He represented clients before the Landmark Preservation Commission many times and claimed credit for hundreds of successful applications before city agencies.

Steve Kramberg, a property manager in Brooklyn who worked with Mr. Heuermann for about 30 years, called him “a gem to deal with, highly knowledgeable.” Mr. Heuermann was “a big goofy guy, a little bit on the nerdy side” who worked long hours and was available day and night, Mr. Kramberg said. But he was also devoted to his wife, who Mr. Kramberg said had health problems, and to his elderly mother.

In Massapequa Park, a tightly gridded village of neat homes with manicured lawns, Mr. Heuermann, the son of an aerospace engineer, lived in the house that he grew up in and tinkered with furniture in his father’s old workshop. A man who went to high school with him said he was bullied as a teenager but sometimes fought back. In 1990, he married an executive at an office supply company. He has a daughter who works at his firm.

Mr. Ferchaw recounted several run-ins with his neighbor, none pleasant. There was the time he said hello to Mr. Heuermann as he was cutting wood and Mr. Heuermann responded by silently glaring back between chops of his splitting maul. Other times he would be seated beside his stacked wood on the porch watching an old television.

Mike Schmidt, who has lived in the neighborhood for 10 years, has a friend who lives behind Mr. Heuermann. Sometimes Mr. Schmidt would visit his buddy, have a few beers in the backyard, look out at the sagging Heuermann house, “and say ‘He probably has bodies there.’”

Last Halloween, Mr. Schmidt and his friend resolved to take their kids trick-or-treating at Mr. Heuermann’s house, just to get a look inside. They were surprised when Mr. Heuermann himself answered the door and gave each child a small plastic pumpkin overflowing with candy.

When Mr. Schmidt’s wife learned where the candy came from, she made him throw it out.

At work, Mr. Heuermann’s punctilious approach rubbed some people the wrong way. Kelly Parisi, a former president of the co-op board at a building in Brooklyn Heights that hired Mr. Heuermann to oversee renovations, said he was “adversarial with everyone” and so “overly fastidious” that the board eventually fired him.

Paul Teitelbaum, another former president of the building’s board, described him as “a really kind of cold and distant person, kind of creepy.” He added, “There was a swagger — ‘I’m the expert, you’re lucky to have me.’”

But one man’s arrogant demands were another’s eye for detail. “He was very good at shepherding things through,” Mr. Kramberg said.

According to the timeline released by prosecutors and to Buildings Department and court records, Mr. Heuermann kept up his busy work schedule even as victims were vanishing.

In 2009, prosecutors said, after killing Melissa Barthelemy, a 24-year-old who worked as an escort, Mr. Heuermann made a series of taunting calls to her family, during lunchtime and after work hours, from locations near his office.

In June 2010, about two weeks after Megan Waterman, a 22-year-old from Maine, was last seen alive, Mr. Heuermann filed an application to install a new fire escape at a building in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. In August of that year, he filed an application to repair the terra cotta and repoint the bricks in a building on the Upper West Side, nine days before Amber Lynn Costello, 27, disappeared near her home a few miles from Mr. Heuermann’s.

On March 9, 2022, as the investigative dragnet was tightening, Mr. Heuermann was writing a typically detailed letter to a lawyer concerning a project on West 71st Street:

“It appears that from my walk through, the drain line is above the interior floor slab and if the trench drain is placed below this level, it would not be able to drain by gravity,” he wrote. “I would strongly recommend an investigation into the use of negative side waterproofing at this site.”

Five days after that, investigators figured out that Mr. Heuermann had owned the same model pickup truck that a witness said Ms. Costello’s killer had driven. Two weeks later, prosecutors said, Mr. Heuermann googled “Long Island serial killer” and viewed an article headlined “New Task Force Aims to Solve Long Island Serial Killer Case.’”

It was late last summer that Mr. Heuermann, sweaty and wearing a dingy T-shirt and shorts, was spotted at the Massapequa Park Whole Foods pilfering clementines from a bowl put out for children.

“He took three and put them in his pocket, then he took more,” said Tara Alonzo, a clerk at the store. After a few more rounds she called him out. “I said, ‘Sir, those are for the kids,’” she recalled. She said Mr. Heuermann yelled back and became so heated that her manager escorted him out. She did not see his face again until it appeared on TV on Friday.

“My co-worker said, ‘That’s the orange guy!’”

Mr. Kramberg said he had talked to Mr. Heuermann on the phone Thursday evening. He was his usual chatty self, cracking jokes.

“That must have been right before he left the office and they arrested him,” Mr. Kramberg said.

Ginia Bellafante, Corey Kilgannon and Michael Wilson contributed reporting. Jack Begg contributed research.