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
