Golden Eye Dome Home
Golden Eye is the home of Margaret Clayton in Port Saint Joe, Florida. When she and her late husband lived in the Bahamas, they found that all homes were named so when she built this home, she named it “Golden Eye.” The house is situated on Beacon Hill—21-feet (6.4 m) above sea level—near Mexico Beach on the Florida panhandle. A half-mile walk (1 km) leads to a beautiful beach on the Gulf of Mexico.
The building lot was narrow and required an ingenious design. Instead of a simple Monolithic Dome, she built a caterpillar shaped house of four interconnected domes of varying sizes. A spherically shaped 26-foot (8 m) diameter by 13-foot (4 m) tall dome connected to two, elliptically shaped 32-foot (9.75 m) diameter by 13-foot (4 m) tall domes, and then connected to one, spherically shaped 24-foot (7.3 m) diameter by 12-foot (3.7 m) tall dome.
She stayed in the home during Hurricane Michael which survived a direct strike by a flying power transformer. She wrote about her experiences in a letter to the Institute.