Qualla: Cape Romano Dome House

Cape Romano Dome House: Introduction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Flyhighnewport, CC BY-SA 4.0. For years, boaters rounding the southern tip of Marco Island would see them -- six pale domes on stilts, standing in the surf like the abandoned outpost of some lost civilization. The structures appeared to be sinking into the Gulf of Mexico, and in a sense, they were. But the Cape Romano Dome House was never meant to be an offshore ruin. When retired oil producer Bob Lee completed the house in 1982, it stood firmly on dry land on an islet near Cape Romano Island, in the maze of mangrove islands called the Ten Thousand Islands. The ocean came to it. Hurricane by hurricane, storm surge by storm surge, the sandy islet eroded until the house that was designed to survive anything stood in open water, its rounded concrete shells resisting the waves even as the ground they rested on disappeared beneath them.

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Image: Flyhighnewport | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cape Romano Dome House: An Inventor's Dream on a Shell Island

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Flyhighnewport, CC BY-SA 4.0. Bob Lee spent 1978 and 1979 surveying and purchasing four adjacent plots on Morgan Island, a remote spit of sand and shell in Collier County, Florida. His family described him as an adventurous inventor, a man who designed a heat source for under-floor warming and rigged a mechan...

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Image: Flyhighnewport | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cape Romano Dome House: Sun, Rain, and Self-Reliance

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Flyhighnewport, CC BY-SA 4.0. Decades before off-grid living became a movement, Lee's dome house operated entirely on renewable resources. Gutters built into the curved roofs channeled rainwater and morning dew down into a 23,000-gallon cistern beneath the central dome. The water passed through filters and su...

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Image: Flyhighnewport | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cape Romano Dome House: The Sea Closes In

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andy Morffew from Itchen Abbas, Hampshire, UK, CC BY 2.0. The Gulf of Mexico was patient. The islet beneath the domes eroded gradually through the 1990s and 2000s, each tropical storm shaving away more sand. In 2005, Lee sold the house to Naples resident John Tosto for $300,000. Tosto invested $500,000 trying to restore the property, wi...

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Image: Andy Morffew from Itchen Abbas, Hampshire, UK | CC BY 2.0

Cape Romano Dome House: The Final Storm

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andy Morffew from Itchen Abbas, Hampshire, UK, CC BY 2.0. On September 28, 2022, Hurricane Ian made the question of the dome house's future irrelevant. The Category 4 storm drove a massive storm surge through the Ten Thousand Islands, and the four remaining domes collapsed. Only a few concrete pilings still break the surface, marking th...

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Image: Andy Morffew from Itchen Abbas, Hampshire, UK | CC BY 2.0