Peter's House - the most amazing house I have ever seen!

Peter is an Austrian born, Bermuda raised 67 year old man who can charm the oink out of a pig. He is just over 5 feet tall, but has a handshake that tells you he could crush your hand if he wanted to. He was a champion water skier in his youth. He reminds me of a colonial English explorer. His accent is thick, like Arnold Schwarzenegger's. And he can tell some fascinating stories. He met Bull Headley, my client's father, in the middle 1990's in Bermuda. In 1997 Bull hired him to run Hidden Valley Inn. When Bull sold Hidden Valley Inn in 2002 Peter semi-retired but continued to help with the property maintenance on Hidden Valley and on Bull Run Farms. He designed this amazing house and got permission to build it on an overlook on the Headley property. It is similar to a house he and his father built in Bermuda which was featured in several architectural and travel magazines. He and a master carpenter named Tullio built it over about 18 months. The house is relatively small, only 1,700 square feet. It has a master bedroom, a guest bedroom, a master bath, a guest bath, an open air living room/family room and kitchen with a vaulted ceiling and an upstairs study. There is a spiral staircase going up to the study supported by a hand hewn Sapodilla tree trunk. The interior walls are plaster and the exterior is stucco. The front of the house is covered with native orchids and other flowering plants. The back of the house is a long series of picture windows with two sliding glass doors that lead out to long but narrow pool with a waterfall (manmade) pouring into it. An arch bridge over the pool takes you to a gazebo Peter somehow built over the escarpment that makes you feel suspended in the air with 500 feet below and a view that spans all of northern Belize.




A hundred feet or so in front of the house is a creek that falls over the escarpment where Peter has installed a water driven generator that gives the house electricity independent of any power grid. There is a backup diesel generator for the dry season.







But probably the coolest feature in the house is the master bathroom. It is like most large bathrooms in any house except there is a bath tub and a separate walk in shower that each have a picture window looking out over the escarpment. The view from inside the shower is spectacular. Peter says he can take a shower while watching falcons fly by. How cool is that?




The aerial view of Peter's house shown in the picture above (click the pic for a larger view) is featured in a book of photos of Belize called Heavenly Belize by Marius Jovaiša: http://www.heavenlybelize.com