How They Pulled It Off: A Florida Beach House That’s Already Survived Three Hurricanes

Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.

There are full-scale mockups, and then there are full-scale mockups.

On the beaches of Sanibel Island, Florida, architects Grace La and James Dallman of La Dallman got to test their hurricane-proof design of a house in a very real way. During construction, the 3,700-square-foot plan was hit by three separate hurricanes over the course of two years—including Hurricane Ian, a deadly category five storm that devastated the Florida gulf coast in 2022. "Our contractor’s shipping container full of equipment floated away during Ian," La said. "But the house remained unscathed."

The clients, a family from the upper Midwest, spent spring break on Sanibel for many years. Wanting a retreat there, they brought on La Dallman to create a two-story residence that combined aesthetic references from Switzerland, where they had lived for work, with strategies to future-proof it from sometimes harsh conditions on a vulnerable shoreline, including a fortified foundation, "breakaway" walls, and piers to raise the first floor.

These strategies were key to designing for the difficult site, but due to extreme flooding risks of the hurricane-prone region, codes and regulations under several jurisdictions dictated the design, too: the island mandates a 35-foot height restriction; FEMA requires that the lowest floor be 15 feet above sea level; and the HOA mandates a pitched roof. "The zoning and flood plain constraints make it a very tight volume to work within," Dallman says. "The house has to be raised to manage the inevitable flooding that is going to happen, but we had to keep the height down."

Because of this web of rules, most homes on the street follow a simple formula: a raised, single-level house with a sloped roof. However, La Dallman was determined to deliver a two-story residence within the limitations that could withstand any storm that comes its way. Here’s how they did it.