Inside A Sand Dune Converted Into An Oceanfront Home | Unique Spaces | Architectural Digest

Neighborhood kids would ride their bikes to the top of the hill here and then go shooting down this angle to be able to put a deck here, provided a little bit of sanity check for us. So what are we actually looking at? This is what we call the Dune House, an underground home built from concrete, very unique in its design and architecture. We are in Atlantic Beach, Florida, right on the ocean. It's a surfing community. This was built 1975. I think it was 1968, Hurricane Dora hit here. Because the dune was so high here, it allowed to be able to build two stories into a dune. The architect is William Morgan, who's very well known, and he lived next door. Instead of pushing the dune aside and building just another box on it, he decided to incorporate a living structure into the actual environment. We had an opportunity to acquire it seven years ago now. The dune houses are actually two separate homes that are mirror images of each other. It's a loft style on both sides, so there's an upstairs and a downstairs, and a sweeping staircase. I'm Jenny Malloy, and I'm Carl Drew, and we want to welcome you to our unique and beautiful sand dune home on the ocean. All right, we are at the entrance to the dune house. Mr. Morgan designed this, in his words, as an experiment. He based it on the Fibonacci principle, or the golden spiral. It was very much built around perfect proportions to really create an aesthetic and a balance that can be found in nature. So come on in, and we'll show you the bedroom area and the upstairs of the loft. This is the upstairs space. The unique thing here is this is the grass roof over top of us. Even though it's the bedroom, it's really integrated into the entire space. The light from the ocean, it comes in. The airflow and everything is enhanced by the openness of the orchestra piece. In addition to having the open airflow created by this wall, it also defines a unique bathroom area. So this is the living space of the dune house. This actually started out as a sunken living room, but because it actually was lower, you didn't get the advantage of the views towards the ocean that we have on this floor. So we actually have raised this floor level up and made it into a more traditional living room area. You will notice that everything is still rounded. The ceilings are, and even this sort of a porthole, if you will. So before we leave this space, I'd like to show you something that was a card from the original owners that they gave to us, and it shows the dune house and what it looked like in the 70s, 80s, 90s, I understand. There was no deck space at the time, and there was no way to sit and sip and have coffee with a full view of the ocean. And so Carl came up with the idea to have two deck spaces and a set of stairs so that our guests or we could easily go from the outside front of the home to the back of the home of the beach area and take advantage of beautiful deck space as well. All right, so now we go into the kitchen area, which is actually surprisingly big for this amount of space. So before, this was a white kitchen. It was a white Formica laminate kitchen, and it just had basic wood shelving. So we updated it with the kitchen cabinets, as well as granite countertops, and we did an open shelving design. When we selected the appliances, it was very much about the tolerances that we needed for the space. So you can see how close, you know, the door had to come to the handles in order to be functional. We weren't afraid of small spaces because we've been on so many sailboats previously. So to us, this felt almost natural and feels a little bit like a sailboat. One of the big additions is we actually added a powder room down here, which provided our guests a lot more convenience rather than have to go up the master suite. It's surprisingly more space than you think because of the rounded nature of the exterior wall. So there's depth and height provided by the nature of that design. The really unique opportunity here was the fact that we're living in a dune on the ocean. So let's take a look at what that's like from the outside. We came up with the master design plan for a pretty little walkway, a fire pit. It just all sort of flows and beautifies the property. So it really has become almost a Garden of Eden as you transition from the inside of the house into the ocean. This is a little secret garden here. So one of the important things we wanted to do was to add an outdoor space where you could really watch and look at the ocean and enjoy it, whether that's over coffee or a glass of wine. Carl came up with this brilliant idea of having a set of stairs, one for each side of the dune house, as well as a deck, a separate deck for each side of the dune house, which again plays on the mirror image of each other. Okay, now we want to show you the deck. Come on. So here we are in the deck of the dune house, and it's still got this private feel up here because we have the grass roof of the dune house right behind us, and it actually gives you privacy from the street. So people riding their bikes or driving by don't even know that you're here. So as you can see from the deck, it affords these scenic views that we didn't have access to before. The sound, the sights, yeah, the smell of the ocean, it's all afforded by sitting up here in this space. The dune house has been a very special place for all of us and our children. Even one of them wanted to study architecture after spending time here in this space. It means a lot to the community and it meant a lot to us, this journey of renovating and putting our unique touches on this space. We really enjoyed the fact that we were able to share this and have you see a part of our space and our lives. Thank you for coming.