and engineer Jonathan Hallett encountered a tan-colored 1,500-square-foot stilt house right on the ocean in Islamorada in the early 2000s, he knew he had found something special—though, admittedly, he used to refer to it as a “no-frills beach shack.” Frill-free or not, Hallett and his family soon found themselves making the trek from Atlanta more and more—some 740 miles on the road just so they could sink their feet in the sand. Then
