Rising dramatically above the beach at Casey Key, near Sarasota, Florida, this captivating house is built almost entirely of concrete.

12/08/2025 09:17:00 PM

Rising dramatically above the beach at Casey Key, near Sarasota, Florida, this captivating house is built almost entirely of concrete. Its nobly pillared façade and airy, terrazzo-paved interior suggest, in spirit, a romantic and fanciful Roman villa. Architect Paul Rudolph designed the house for Mr. and Mrs. Frederick A. Deering, a mature couple whose children are grown and married. The Deerings enjoy their house the year round and find its design fosters a wonderfully tranquil way of life. In contrast to its formal exterior, the house has a delightfully informal four-level plan. Solid and sturdy, the building will resist hurricanes, and a silicon coating on the walls fends off rain. All the walls and pillars are built of lime concrete block, an exceptionally hard type because of its lime content. It is the color of pale golden sand. The pillars are faced with cypress of the same golden tone which also forms a decorative frame around the concrete block panels as well as the house itself. Both front and back walls can be opened wide to the breeze, but privacy is assured either by lattices or by glass fiber screening.

Sliding glass doors or windows open every room in the house, except the reading room, to the loggia. The living room is the conversation and music center. A long built-in cabinet for radio, phonograph and record storage separates it from the reading room, designed for quiet seclusion. The reading room has a fireplace and one fixed glass window. The dining room behind the loggia is used only for small gatherings. It has lavish storage space in a wall-hung cypress cabinet for linens, place mats and silver. The kitchen, efficiently fitted with cypress cabinets and stainless steel counters and equipment, is as handy to the loggia as to the dining room—a great convenience for the Deerings who like to give buffet suppers and cocktail parties in the high handsome room with the sweeping view of the Gulf.

The pillared, two-story loggia is the hub of the house and accounts for nearly half the total square footage. This room is actually a great porch separated from outdoors only by glass-fiber screening between the pillars. Since it lets in so much breeze and shades the rooms behind it from the hot sun, it assures a comfortable interior. The size of the loggia, the rhythmic pattern of the pillars, and the pale sand color of the floors and walls create a feeling of uncommon serenity. As in all of the other rooms in the house, the walls are lime block and the floor, terrazzo—both appropriate materials for the seaside. Neither water nor sandy footprints can mar the surface underfoot and the concrete is happily impervious to the rot, mildew and insects which are sub-tropical Florida's perennial antagonists.

The plan of the house is refreshingly informal. The rooms are spread over four levels, each a few steps apart. As you move from level to level the ceiling heights and the shapes of the rooms change in a way that gives engaging variety. And each level offers its own view of the Gulf of Mexico and the beach. On the first floor are the dining room, kitchen and guest room. Aluminum framed glass partitions and sliding doors separate these rooms from the loggia which is on the same level. A stairway from the entrance hall leads down to the garage. Another stair rises from the loggia to the living room on the second level. From there four steps bring you up to the reading room on the third level and seven steps more to the top floor. On this fourth level is the master bedroom, bath and study. Each has sliding glass windows (equipped with blinds), that can be opened to the upper air of the loggia. A delightful extension of the study is the deck that bridges one end of the loggia. Almost all the furniture upstairs as well as on the lower levels was designed by the architect and built in. The house has 2,690 square feet of enclosed interior including 1,300 square feet of screened loggia.