A Dream Home Built to Share
The Marsicovetere family built their vacation home in 2012 in Escuintla, Guatemala, inside a beachfront community where neighboring houses were also topped with natural thatch. It was designed as a gathering place for a large extended family: long weekends, holidays, and time with friends, all under one roof meant to last for generations. Little did they suspect that they faced a thatch roof fire risk.
The Night Everything Changed
At 3:00 a.m. on an April morning in 2017, during the Easter holiday, a neighbor’s natural thatch roof caught fire. Flames spread quickly from roof to roof across the dry material, eventually reaching the Marsicovetere home. By the time the fire was out, four houses had burned.
Twenty family members were asleep inside when the fire started. A passerby ran through the neighborhood shouting for people to get out. One of Silvana’s sisters woke first, saw the flames, and roused the rest of the house. The family escaped only minutes before the roof collapsed.
“Feeling safe is priceless,” said Silvana Marsicovetere, an owner of the home.
The family had let their insurance policy lapse just two months earlier. The premium had been priced high specifically because of the fire risk natural thatch carried, and after five years without incident, the family had decided the odds were in their favor. The fire destroyed the home in a single night. Total losses across the family exceeded $600,000, with no insurance to offset them.
Rebuilding Without Repeating the Risk
Rebuilding meant ruling out natural thatch entirely. The family searched Guatemala for a synthetic alternative but found nothing that matched the look, quality, or warranty they needed; some options were tempting enough to make them consider abandoning the thatch aesthetic altogether.
Then they remembered a 2014 family trip to Disney’s Aulani Resort in Hawaii, where nearly every roof was finished in palm thatch. Reasoning that a resort of that scale would never accept the fire risk of natural material, the family searched for the company behind Aulani’s roofing and found Endureed.
They requested samples, and once the boxes arrived in Guatemala, the decision was made.
Working With Endureed
The Endureed team reviewed the family’s original roof design to provide an accurate quote and helped them recreate it using Performance Palm, nullifying their thatch roof fire risk completely.
“Never once did they try to oversell,” Silvana said. “When the boxes arrived we didn’t know how to install it, but they walked us through every step, providing quick access to installation videos and tips. It was incredibly fast.”
The family ordered roughly 1,500 square meters of material and, working with their architect and builder, completed installation in under two months.
Life After the Rebuild
Since rebuilding, the Marsicoveteres have had years to see how the roof holds up. It still looks as new as the day it was installed, and the family has noticed benefits beyond fire safety.
“We no longer have bats in the house,” Silvana said. “They were living in our roof before, but almost two years since rebuilding the house, none have appeared.”
The family also no longer needs to spray pesticides to manage the maintenance issues that came with their old natural thatch roof.
Theirs was the first home in Guatemala to install Endureed’s engineered thatch. Several neighboring homeowners have since followed, drawn by the same combination of fire resistance, low maintenance, and authentic design the Marsicoveteres found.
In Their Own Words
“We are sure our family vacation home is safe and secure from fire, and it gives us comfort knowing we are safe,” Silvana said.
With Performance Palm, the Marsicovetere family rebuilt the home they designed to last for generations, this time with the fire risk removed. They have spent the years since filling it with the same gatherings, holidays, and memories it was always meant to hold.
This isn’t the only time that Endureed thatch has fought flames and won. Click here to read about how Endureed faced the Lahaina wildfires in Hawaii and came out unscathed!
