The Wonder House rises four stories in a cruciform plan, its 18-inch-thick walls built from bedrock quarried directly from the property, reinforced with steel rails bought as scrap from a railroad line. Good lumber was scarce in 1920s Florida, so Schuck improvised with concrete, glass, tile, and those repurposed train rails. Every room opens onto two porches. The central fireplace was engineered to create a natural draft for cooling, while hollow pillars trapped rainwater and channeled it down the exterior walls - an early form of passive air conditioning in subtropical heat. Mirrors positioned at the top of the fireplace caught sunlight and redirected it through a prism, casting colored light throughout the interior like a private kaleidoscope. One-way glass and strategically placed mirrors let Schuck see the front door from virtually anywhere in the house, including the third-floor balcony.

Each bedroom had its own balcony, and Schuck installed outdoor bathtubs on several of them - rooftop soaking under the Florida sky. A fish pond graced the third-floor balcony. The front yard held a large, three-stepped, irregularly shaped swimming pool that Schuck called a moat. Hand carvings and mosaics decorated the walls throughout. The colored light show from the fireplace prism, however, attracted the wrong kind of attention during World War II. Neighbors grew suspicious that Schuck might be signaling German planes, and he was arrested and jailed for three days. The FBI investigated, issued a press release clearing him of espionage, and Schuck responded by filling his beloved fireplace with concrete. The rainbow light show was over, a casualty of wartime paranoia.

Starting in 1934, Schuck opened the Wonder House to visitors. For a dime you could see the grounds; a quarter got you inside. During the Depression and through the postwar years, the house became a genuine Florida roadside attraction, drawing curious visitors until the 1960s. Schuck, the man who was supposed to die decades earlier, was still leading tours of his creation. After he finally sold the property, the Wonder House passed through multiple owners, was lost in foreclosures, and sat vacant for years, slowly deteriorating. Schuck himself died in 1971 at 94 - nearly half a century after his terminal diagnosis.

The property was sold at auction in 2015, and its new owners began a painstaking restoration. The rebuilding was significant enough to be featured in episode 9 of the Netflix series Amazing Interiors. Today the Wonder House offers guided historic tours by advance online reservation, giving visitors a chance to walk through the rooms Schuck built with his sons while living across the street, improvising solutions that still feel ahead of their time. The passive cooling, the natural lighting tricks, the integrated water management - Schuck was practicing sustainable architecture decades before the term existed, driven not by ideology but by a dying man's urgency to build something remarkable before time ran out.