Table Of Content
The fact that it also includes a crew member from Everwater Charters adds an interesting personal touch to the photo. In recent years, the Cape Romano Dome House has faced challenges due to coastal erosion and rising sea levels. Preservation initiatives have been launched to protect this architectural gem from the forces of nature. Local authorities, architects, and environmentalists are collaborating to find innovative solutions to safeguard the Cape Romano Dome House for future generations.
Reasons To Buy Single Trip Travel Insurance
In 1987, the new owners came into financial trouble, and Lee repossessed the home, moved back in, and remained there till 1993. That was the year Hurricane Andrew hit Florida, but as Lee intended, his dome home withstood the storm. But, other problems with erosion on the small island eventually forced Lee to leave. For several years, Lee and his family used the dome home as their vacation house, and even then, the family heard wild stories about the very house they lived in. In an interview with a local magazine, Coastal Breeze, Lee’s daughter, Janet Maples, told a story about overhearing locals discussing her home.
Cape Romano Dome House, Florida: A Marvel of Architectural Ingenuity
Bob Lee believed that buildings which contained sharp corners featured ample “wasted space” so he opted to build a structure with rounded edges which resembled an igloo. The rounded design of Bob Lee’s vacation home—which featured 6 separate domes—proved to be exceptionally resistant to hurricane damage. The only trouble was that many locals had difficulty accepting the unusual dome-shaped structure.
Spittal Pond Nature Reserve
Nevertheless, because of the damaged windows, the interior was completely destroyed. Unfortunately, the island had already begun to change and other nearby residences had been destroyed by the time that happened. The Lee family left the Cape Romano Dome House in 1992, and it remained vacant until 2005. It was constructed to withstand hurricane winds and other erratic weather conditions in Florida. Lee had to purchase a barge to bring building supplies to the construction site because of the isolated location.
Photos Inside The Bob Lee Dome House
We choose to take a tour to explore the islands and the dome houses. Alex Demooy of Breakwater Adventures and Athena Custodio, both of Naples, were out shelling on Friday morning when they came across what remained of the iconic and popular structures. At one point in time they were fully on land, built in 1982, but erosion had in a sense pushed the homes into the water. By 2013, the home was officially abandoned and was sitting in water six feet deep. The home was a tourist attraction by this point and has continued to sink deeper and deeper underwater due to Hurricane Irma in September 2017. In 2018, ownership of the home officially transferred to the state of Florida.
Cape Romano Dome House, The Fallen Landmark Of South Florida - All That's Interesting
Cape Romano Dome House, The Fallen Landmark Of South Florida.
Posted: Mon, 02 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Other Dome Homes In Florida
The permit application stated that construction materials would have been delivered by barge, and work was timed to avoid sea turtle and shorebird nesting seasons. After the completion of the Cape Romano Dome House in 1982, Lee and his family sold it just two years later in 1984. When the owner got into financial troubles, the Lee family repossessed the home in 1987. By this time, the erosion of the beach had already started which threatened the few homes in the area. Monte Innes and his family sold the Pyramid in 1988 to a couple in Ohio. The couple bought it believing they could save from being up by the rising ocean, but before the couple was able to move in, the home was destroyed by a tornado.
History of the Cape Romano Home
“With the goal of building a holiday house, Bob Lee, a now-deceased former oil producer, spent a significant portion of the years 1978 and 1979 surveying and buying land on Cape Romano. He didn’t care about the feasibility of the property he was building them on; all he cared about was having a facility that was solar-powered and self-sufficient. He constructed a full-scale replica on property he owned in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, before completing the Cape Romano Dome House. Bob, Margaret, and their kids started building a vacation house near to Morgan Island in 1980.
Monte Innes had built a windmill as a partial power source and used the porches to catch water to drain into their cistern. The property also featured multiple aviaries that contained toucans, African greys, finches, and macaws, along with chickens, geese, turkeys, ducks, pheasants, peacocks, a black swan, skunks, and emus. After the Cape Romano dome house was completed in 1982, the family used it as a vacation home for a time, but the Lees eventually sold it just two years later. The new owners struggled financially, and three years after they’d sold it, Lee and his family foreclosed and moved back in. This would be the Cape Romano dome house, a genuine curiosity, idiosyncratically designed by an amateur inventor who loved to tinker. In September 2022, the remains of the famed Cape Romano dome house were destroyed by Hurricane Ian, a category 4 storm that reached peak intensity while over the house’s location in southwest Florida.
According to his family, oil producer Bob Lee was an inventive, innovative man who was forever taking on new projects and testing out novel ideas. In the late 70s, Bob Lee decided to build a distinctive dome-shaped vacation home on Morgan Island in Florida. Bob Lee was committed to making his eye-catching retreat sustainable and hurricane proof.
According to Bob Lee’s daughter, Janet Maples, Lee sincerely enjoyed creating the strange structure and figuring out new ways to make life on the island easier. He even went so far as to build a full-scale model near his home in Tennessee. In the late 1970s, Bob Lee, an independent oil businessman who retired at 44, and his wife, Margaret, dreamed of building a vacation home on the southern coast of Florida. They began buying plots of land on Cape Romano, just a few miles off the southern tip of Marco Island. Decades of harsh weather and rising sea levels pushed the structures past their limit, and it took another two hurricanes, Irma and Ian, to bring them down at last.
These unique structures gained prominence in response to the state's vulnerability to hurricanes. It was constructed in 1980 by the now-deceased oil producer Bob Lee, as an eco-friendly local landmark which was the dream vacation home for Bob Lee’s family. The house consists of six white painted concrete stouts that are interconnected, and included three bedrooms and three bathrooms inside. Lee purchased a barge to move the necessary supplies to build the dome homes. The masterpiece consisted of six connected dome structures for 2,400 square feet. The Cape Romano Dome House was a unique architectural masterpiece.
Ian was simply too much and the once beloved attraction and historical building is now under water – permanently. Now, just the concrete top of one of the dome homes could be seen at low tide, appearing almost like the back of a small white whale as it comes up for air. Two of the dome-shaped homes were so severely damaged by Hurricane Irma in September 2017 that they toppled into the water. Cape Romano Dome Houses’ ownership was given to the state, who now owns it, in 2018. Fortunately, Dorian did not do any damage to the Cape Romano Dome House, which weathered the 2019 hurricane season. The abandoned domes are a perfect environment for both animals and wild mythology because there is no hope of their recovery.
The Cape Romano dome home inspires artists, storytellers and curious travelers. It’s become a tourist destination, a fishing hotspot and an iconic part of the Southwest Florida landscape. The domes weren’t built by aliens, as a few imaginative storytellers have proposed, nor were they guarded by armed settlers. The facade of the Cape Romano Dome House reflects a harmonious blend of form and function. The domes, with their smooth and curved exteriors, mimic the organic shapes found in nature.
By 1980, they had accumulated enough land, and the project began.
Florida Adventures and Rentals charters boat tours, three times daily from Caxambas Park Marina, located at the south end of Marco Island. It was purchased in 2005 by the John Tosto family with the hopes of renovating the home and making it functional again. Tosto planned on relocating the domes off state-owned lands and bringing them into compliance with county building codes. The domes will be moved by crane and set atop new concrete or steel pilings more than 50 feet from the high tide line and at least 25 feet away from wetlands behind the site.
