Miami Couple Builds Off-the-Grid Holiday Hut in the Bahamas: Photos

They started the project in 2016 and approached it as a side project. Because their property was on a remote island with limited resources, one of the Brillharts’ main concerns was that the hut should be easy to construct.

“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.

The couple experimented with the design of the hut by building miniature models.

“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.

Jacob constructed the house frame in their Miami backyard, then took it all apart and shipped the parts to Eleuthera.

“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.

This gave him control over how the frame would turn out, which in turn determined how the rest of the construction process would go.

“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.

The couple managed to complete the construction of the hut in early 2021, more than five years after they started working on it.

Eleuthera is a 55-minute plane ride away from Miami, and their house is a 30-minute drive from the Eleuthera airport. The couple spent their long weekends and free time going to the island to work on their vacation home.

They started living there before anything in the house was ready, building the rooms and facilities that they needed as they went along, she added.

“We moved in way before we should have,” she said. “My daughter Simms was three months old when she first stayed there, and it was just plywood. There was just maybe a sink in there, with a bathroom, and that was about it.”

The completed hut is about 600 square feet. There’s a smaller outbuilding on the side of the home that’s connected by a boardwalk that runs through the entire 1.8-acre lot.

The main hut comprises two stories: The first floor has a kitchen and living room, while the second floor has a bedroom and a small bathroom.

“Jacob literally built every single thing that you see in the cabin, with exception of maybe some dining chairs that we had bought off of a hotel in Miami a long time ago,” Melissa said. This included the furniture such as the kitchen table, the sofa, and the bed frames.

Since they did the bulk of the work themselves over a period of five years, it’s hard for them to estimate how much they spent in all, Jacob said: “We can’t put a number to it because we don’t really know.” 

The Brillharts originally intended for all the walls on the first floor to be made of glass, but ended up with a half-glass, half-screen design.