The views from the lot were so amazing that she had the idea to build a circular home, with each room offering a different view of the beautiful landscape. Rodriguez started looking for plans online, and soon landed on the website of Deltec Homes, a North Carolina manufacturer of prefabricated circular homes. As she scrolled through the company’s marketing materials, Rodriguez noticed, among other things, that the structure, with its sealed roof and walls fixed to the foundation, was designed to withstand hurricanes. “I felt like I’d struck gold,” she says.
It took years and a lot of hiccups with local builders and contractors, but her home was finally completed last year. It wasn’t cheap: Deltec siding, roofing and other major components cost nearly $360,000, and the Rodriguez family spent another $980,000 on permits, foundations, framing, plumbing, HVAC, finishes and fees. Hard work and savings made it possible, Rodriguez emphasizes. Building such a home in their dream location had been a “lifetime goal” for the couple.
While the house was still under construction, Hurricane Ian struck. The structure was undamaged, but one of the patio doors was knocked off its hinges. The real test came in late August 2023, when Category 4 hurricane Idalia arrived. As it approached Florida, universities and airports were closed, the National Guard was activated, and space launches at Cape Canaveral were canceled. The Rodriguez family moved what they could to the upper floors of their new home, packed their car, and drove to a hotel in Orlando.
Their home never lost power during the storm, so Rodriguez was able to watch the hurricane creep closer and closer. Security camera lights dimly lit the outside of their house at night, but the sun came up and the full force of the hurricane arrived around 7:45 a.m., when Idalia made landfall about 180 miles north.
“We could see the floodwaters coming into the garage,” she recalls. But the live footage didn’t look too bad overall. To their relief. As they drove back to survey the damage, they passed neighboring homes where parts of siding had peeled off and large parts of roofs had been destroyed. The Rodriguez home was relatively unscathed. The floodwaters on the lower floors receded quickly, and although the family lost some of the belongings they’d stored there, the house itself recovered as designed.
“We’re OK. We’re going to be OK,” Rodriguez remembers thinking that morning after they were evacuated. “And we were OK,” she said.
Rodriguez said rebar runs from the home’s foundation through the walls and onto the roof, the balcony floor joists run into the center of the building, and the windows, made by door and window manufacturer Marvin, are designed to withstand hurricane-force winds and rain.
“We have a 99.9 percent survival rate,” says Steve Linton, president of Deltec Homes. “We’ve had two homes that have had structural damage.” One of those, he explains, was built decades ago to a somewhat subpar standard; the other was “builder-defective” and was damaged in a Category 5 storm. To date, the company has manufactured more than 5,000 homes, mostly in the U.S. but distributed across 30 countries worldwide. The prefabricated wall and roof sections are assembled into a single unit, then assembled into a single unit. At a factory in North Carolina We can ship virtually anywhere.
