new things,” Melisssa told Insider. “So we thought, ‘Why don’t we see if we can find a piece of land here to build on?’ And we did.”
They made the decision to build their new hideaway on a peaceful beachside parcel that was shrouded in dense vegetation. They opted not to disclose the purchase price of the parcel.
“It’s an interesting place because on the one hand, you’re almost in the woods, but at the same time, you’re also by the ocean. It’s all within immediate proximity,” Melissa said.
The pair built scale versions of the hut as an experiment in hut design.
“It needed to be affordable, it needed to be something that we could ship over on a shipping container, and it needed to be something that we could assemble ourselves,” Melissa said.
“We did some sort of creative design strategies where it’s a combination of stick frame and post and beam construction, which enabled Jacob to just build it on-site by hand,” she said.
The project was started in 2016 and was treated as a side endeavor. The Brillharts’ main concern was that the hut should be simple to build because their property was on a sparsely populated island.
Jacob built the home structure in their Miami garden before disassembling it and shipping the components to Eleuthera. Jacob assembled the hut’s exterior with help from a local builder once the structure was sent to Eleuthera.
This gave him influence over the final design of the frame, which in turn decided how the remaining construction would proceed.
“I had more tools and more capabilities in Miami than I did out there on the island at that time, where we had no power and no water,” Jacob said.
“Building the frame first meant that I could get everything to fit and work, and put it back together in a much shorter amount of time on the island,” he said.
“Jake is there at least once a month, but we like to spend at least three weeks there around the Christmas holidays,” she said. “And then we get in another two or three weeks in extended stays here and there through the year.”
