Unique homes in Palm Beach County: Castle, church, shipping container

Whoever said a home has to be a house? Why can’t it be a former fire station? Or a church? Or eco-friendly corrugated shipping containers made livable with plywood and plumbing? Or a castle out of a childhood fairy tale?

When we went looking for Palm Beach County’s quirkiest houses, we found eccentricity rendered in concrete, steel and wood.

Back in the 1980s, Bruce Woods decided the five acres of land he’d just purchased in rural Wellington needed a castle.

Now, after 28 years, it has one.

Woods’ version of Ireland’s 1184 LaHort Castle rises over the Rustic Ranches subdivision like a gray mirage. There are no misty moors surrounding Wood’s dream home, but it does have a kind of moat on one side, created from a drainage pond.

After a devastating car accident which forced him to halt construction for a few years, the carpenter-handyman-painter-artist is nearly finished with his hand-made dream. His last task is covering his castle with “stone” he carves from a mix of three different kinds of concrete, making his house not just a castle, but a fortress.

“If there’s a hurricane, this is the place you want to be,” said Woods. Read the full story here

Palm Beach County officials wouldn’t let Rick Clegg build a house out of sustainable bamboo, so in 2015 he persuaded them to let him make one out of discarded steel shipping containers.

He welded one 40x8-foot steel box on top of two others to build what Clegg believes was the county's first shipping container house.

A real estate entrepreneur who owns the eco-adventure company Jupiter Outdoors Center, Clegg wanted to build something in keeping with his values of environmental sustainability.

"It's a classic example of upcycling," said Clegg, who placed the air-conditioned three-bedroom home on property he owns on the Loxahatchee River in Jupiter Farms.

Named "Headwaters Jupiter," Clegg rents the home on Airbnb and the Glamping.com website.

He now helps others build their own container homes through an association with Giant Container Sales, which sells and modifies shipping containers for homes and businesses, provided building codes allow. Read the full story here

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Ray and Ruth Wenger must have been a fun couple, judging by the home they built that bursts with a zany, irresistible charm.

In post-war Boynton Beach, Ray constructed the house himself in a Nautical Moderne version of Art Deco, all crazy heart-shaped cutouts, porthole windows and wedding cake-like stacked eyebrow ledges, like a 1940s cartoon house, painted today in bright primary colors. He finished it in 1948, in an unincorporated pocket off Old Dixie Highway, between Boynton Beach and Delray Beach.

Inside, current owner and preservationist Linda Stabile and her late husband, Calvin Zimmer, have maintained its Florida Deco exuberance, which includes a kitchen styled like a post-war diner, with a built-in checkered tile topped table. Read the full story here

"I've always been a little strange," says Bob Kreiner. "I have a pretty open mind about stuff."

That includes his definition of a house, which in the case of Kreiner and his wife, Barbara, is three monolithic domes joined together, a bit like the segmented body of a blue caterpillar.

When the retired sea captain and operations department head from The Breakers decided a dome home was in his future, he hired a company in 2006 that built it on site, covering a rounded form with concrete, in which a steel frame is embedded.

Inside, where the ceilings are 18-and-a-half feet tall at the top of the domes, the Kreiners have divided the space into three bedrooms and two baths, all with curved walls.

There are no downsides to living in a dome, according to Kreiner, who says hurricane winds can't get a grip on his house located on a quiet street in the Westgate neighborhood. Thick concrete walls muffle sounds and keep the couple's FPL bill down to about $65, even in the summer.

Gretchen and Keith Miller sleep where firefighters once waited for alarms to ring. Their living and dining rooms were once parking bays for fire trucks.

In 2006, the Millers bought West Palm Beach's decommissioned fire station No. 3, an Art Moderne building built in 1938 in the city's Northwood neighborhood.

After lending it to the local Red Cross chapter for a 2016 Designers' Show House, the Millers returned to their now-luxurious firehouse home.

And in answer to the inevitable question, no, there aren't any fire poles. Read the full story here

Palm Beachers built mammoth castles overlooking the ocean. Charles Freehauf constructed his very literal version of a castle in Juno Beach, with a view of little Pelican Lake.

Although many people think the landmark house on Ocean Drive dates from the area's early settlers, the retired Chicago builder, who died in 2016, constructed his masterpiece for his wife in 1985.

Like a castle out of a romantic fairy tale, it includes archways and outdoor staircases, turrets and windows that look like leaded glass, on a house covered with stucco designed to look like stone.

All it lacks is a moat and a knight in shining armour.

Some families might have looked at the valuable waterfront site of the Old Bethesda-by-the-Sea Church and thought “tear down.” But Mimi Maddock McMakin and her family thought of the deconsecrated 1894 church as home.

After all, the surrounding property has been in her family for more than 120 years.

The Queen Anne shingle-style church was built during Palm Beach’s pioneer days, when the pedestrian-only Lake Trail that runs in front of the church was the island’s main road. Most parishioners came by boat before a larger Bethesda-by-the-Sea was built in the center of the island.

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McMakin, a fourth generation Palm Beacher and descendent of the pioneer Maddock family, raised her family in the whimsical building, where her daughters grew up roller-skating on the former sanctuary’s wooden floors and roaming among the family’s former compound of four houses.

The house was recently transferred to the next generation. McMakin’s daughter, Celerie Kemble, herself a celebrated interior designer who runs the New York office of her mother’s Kemble Interiors design firm, is now the owner of her childhood home.

Eccentricity thrives under the Florida sun, which is one explanation for the three geodesic domes nestled into a spectacular, almost-untouched 2.5-acre ocean-to-Intracoastal jungle in Manalapan.

Maybe owner Gyora Novak, who built the experiment in sci-fi living in 1968, simply liked the idea of living without right angles on what today seems a piece of tropical paradise, with 200 feet on the ocean and 200 feet on the waterway. Each dome is built of 60 triangles of Douglas fir, bolted together, then covered by a reinforced concrete skin, Novak told The Coastal Star newspaper.

Ten years later, the domes, inspired by futurist Buckminster Fuller, were sold to Stephen and Jeanette Cohen, who own them still.

The three domes are perched in a semi-circle near the edge of a large pool, centered between a dock leading to the inland waterway and across A1A, a path to the beach.

Through the years, the surrounding landscape has grown taller than the domes, shielding them from views and ensuring privacy for what the owners must consider home, sweet dome.

A historic home in Lake Worth Beach has long been known as "the Birthday Cake Castle." It got its nickname after former World War I spy and anti-communist writer Upton Close gave the house to his wife, Margaret Fretter Nye, on her birthday in 1954. Stained glass on the north side of the home shows a cake and a balloon. It was the Red Cross' Designer Show House in 2015.