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Chronicles of the Design & Construction of Two Waterfront Hurricane Proof Dry Stack Modular Green Custom Homes
1. Villa Lagoon, Wilder Italian Style Home
2. Nasello Italian Style Home


Nasello Italian Style Home

This pictorial Journal is of an Italian style Gulf Front home built of dry-stacked DAC-ART man-made stone, a concrete building system developed by Ted Dial.. Construction began in 2006.

This portion of this website chronicles the construction of a Gulf Coast DAC-ART home built for Mary and Jerry Nasello. It had been added to and updated as construction continued.

Early drawings shown first, just to show you the progression when you are working with an architect and having custom plans created for your own specific job.

The house has developed from these early ideas. We have changed the upper porch arches and will be using a slightly curved block sometimes called an 'eyebrow' to allow for the necessary depth for the top floor cocktail pool. On the east elevation you see three garage openings but we now actually have a forth garage opening. The entire house got bigger than what you see here in these plans.

South elevation, early sketch
South Elevation

North elevation of DAC-ART concrete home sketch
North Elevation

Sketch of west elevation of proposed concrete block house
West Elevation

East elevation sketch of proposed custom waterfront home
East Elevation

DAC-ART is a patented man made concrete stone block system designed by Ted Dial of Mobile, AL. All DAC-ART homes are designed by Ted Dial. The incredibly strong blocks he has developed are named for 'Dial Architectural Component'. It is a modular building system that has the look of classic architecture with a solid inner core of reinforced concrete plus layers of insulation.

The images below were made from digital photographs of the printed plans. You can click on the individual elevations to see a larger image to better see the details.

South Elevation of Waterfront Home
South Elevation

North elevation of Italian styled concrete home
North Elevation

West elevation of concrete block house
West Elevation

East elevation of a hurricane proof house
East Elevation

We are not self contracting. We have hired a local builder. This is his first DAC-ART construction project.

Watch the Progress:

Site Work Begins

Feb 25th, 2005 "We are finally seeing some progress. The road and driveways have been surveyed and staked and we have hired a gentleman to do some clearing with a tractor. The large pipe is to allow us to place the driveway between two wetlands and still allow water to flow back and forth without disturbing the wetlands. To date we have had 88 cubic yards of sand delivered and we now know that we will need at least 125 more.

Wetland coastal land in South Alabama Driveway and drainage for lowlands in coastal Alabama

This pipe has since been somewhat flattened by the heavy truck's crossing. Our block deliveries plus the huge truck the pilings came on have been more weight than this pipe was designed to support. The ridges in the pipe are 1" from peak to valley so when we replace this pipe at the close of construction, we will go with a heavier pipe who's ridges are 2" peak to valley.

Photos by Jerry Nasello

Continue on to the Construction Journal