A Stunning Earth Sheltered House in Switzerland

So, we’re back to the topic of earth sheltered homes. This one’s located in the mountains of Switzerland and was built by the famous Dutch architecture study SeARCH in collaboration with Christian Muller Architects.

This is not your usual earth sheltered home. It’s cleverly built into a Southern slope of a small roundish hill featuring an amazing elliptical facade. The rough surface of the wall blends very well with the nature – it looks like a part of the hill.

One thing you will either love or hate is the minimalist interior. You could hardly imagine words “cosy” and “bare concrete” together in one sentence. I’m not sure if they belong together anyway. What do you think? I don’t know what it feels like living in a house like that but you have to agree that bare concrete in the interior looks very artistic.

Now, I’m not a big fan of concrete for obvious reasons (this is a green architecture website after all and it is difficult to call concrete green) but if you choose to build an earth sheltered home, unfortunately, concrete is the only reasonable material to choose.

There’s just no other way for it to be water-tight and efficient. Other than that, we can discuss whether an earth sheltered home is eco-friendly or not. It will surely save you great deal of money on heating and cooling bills and, especially in this particular example, you’ll be living in a unique house.