I’ve always wanted an underground home. Not just an earthsheltered home with an exposed southern wall like you often see, I want a really and truly underground home.
I’m still at the playing with ideas and hunting for an architect stage, but I’m majorly inclined to the idea of a central atrium/garden room completely roofed with a clear dome and most of the other rooms having glass walls onto it for ‘views’ and natural lighting. Lesser rooms would have solar tubes to supply ‘day light’ as needed, or simply artificial light in the case of store rooms, utility rooms and the like.
Does anyone know of exising homes like this? I would love to contact their owners and hopefully gain the benefit of their experiences.
Here’s a web site with a lot of links, including tours of homes.
A couple of years ago I looked into a design which was a buried fiberglas shell. IIRC it was called “egg homes” or something. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find it just now.
I have, many times. You get lots of sites about living beneath/outside the law, and underground music. Even the sites that are about housing aren’t about true underground living in most cases. They’re either those ‘earthsheltered’ homes – basically a standard home with sloping walls of dirt built up around three sides, plus maybe a foot or so of dirt over the roof – or else they’re something completely above ground, just built of a non-standard material or shape. Geodesic domes, ‘straw bale’ houses, rammed-mud houses, old tire houses… It’s like ‘underground house’ is equated to ‘hippie housing central.’
I want to build an ‘ordinary’ house – in the sense of rectangular rooms, built out of things like concrete and steel reinforments, tied into the powergrid etc. in the normal way – just located below ground to take advantage of things like zero exterior maintenance, low energy costs due to the insulation effect of being out of the wind, greater physical security (many fewer points of potential ingress), being virtually invulnerable to damage from wild fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc.
It doesn’t seem that weird to me – but given my inability to find others who have built anything like this, maybe that’s because I am weird. I was hoping to hear how others have dealt with problems like tradition minded building inspectors, good methods of waterproofing, finding contractors to build unique buildings. Also how they deal with life-style aspects. Do they MISS having real views? Have they run into problems with the house being too tight? How do you indicate to passersby that that seemingly empty ‘natural meadow’ is actually the roof of my house and please don’t picnic on it or stare down through the skylights like we’re goldfish in your aquarium.
That sort of stuff.
Maybe there just aren’t any pilgrims out there who have blazed the way and faced and overcome the obstacles. Maybe we’ll have to be the pilgrims.
Bomb shelters?
There were a lot of those built when I was a kid. Quite a few, anyway.
I’m semi-serious. Some folks actually lived in them.
Peace,
mangeorge
There was a TV show about those old missile silos. One had been converted into a home. The former missile control room was now a bedroom. A second one had been converted into a school. The third one, the guy let the silo part fill up with groundwater (which is what happens naturally if you just shut off the pumps) and uses it for scuba diving.
No, I don’t know anyone. I’m not an expert either. Skip to the next post if you want.
That said, I think Malcolm Wells started the whole idea of earth-sheltered architecture. In Underground Designs, he explains why underground design centered around building into a slope and piling dirt on top: it can be done on sloping lots which cost less (or did at the time of publishing), and it reduces construction costs compared to what you want (“reduce” being a relative term here.)
It sounds like you basically want a basement, then top it with a flat roof strong enough to support a few feet of dirt. It’ll cost 'ya. Dug basements can be the most expensive part of a house, and the roof will cost quite a bit more than any residential roof (I’m no expert, but I would guess that it would have to be built like a commercial roof with overhead parking.) Beyond that, extra attention would have to be given to waterproofing the walls and you would have to have big windows in every room that open to daylight in order to satisfy code requirements that each habitable room have two exits in case of fire.
I’d assume that any cost savings from reduced maintenance and energy consumption would be more than offset by increased construction costs, and the added security from intruders and safety from natural disaster would be offset by a greater risk of perishing in a fire. Moreover, tornado and hurricane damage (really the same thing unless you’re in range of a storm surge) are easily offset by tying the structure together. You might be able convert a missle silo on the cheap, but unless it could cheaply be brought to code, I wouldn’t call it a bargain.
Try searching for “subterranean homes” or “earth-sheltered homes”. Or go to HGTV , which did a special on underground homes, and find the list of books at the bottom of any page of the article.
Those missle homes are pretty cool, too. HGTV did a Dream Builder’s episode covering a silo conversion–the people whose house they documented are the same ones running the web site Sam Stone links to.
No, I’m not going to ignore you – you raise good points.
I agree that digging the hole would be a big expense, but I’m not sure it would be all that much more than digging the basement for an ordinary house. We’re planning on a small house – we’re a childless couple and will remain so, and we’re looking for something that simply meets our needs not some trophy house. The floor size would be larger than it would otherwise be because of the inclusion of the atrium area, but that is only going to be in the range of 10’X20’, and our living room and dining room areas will be smaller than usual in anticipation of the atrium space being used to help meet those needs.
I think the fire code problem can be satisfied by adding an outside door at the surface level of the atrium, with stairs leading down the west wall to the ‘floor’ level. All the main room (two bedrooms, livingroom/dining room, kitchen) will have direct access into the atrium. In addition, the rooms on the south side of the house (living/kitchen) will have access via a hallway that runs from the main entry (in the southeast corner) along the ‘back’ side of those rooms, with the space on the other side of the hallway being used for a half bathroom, laundry, utility and storage rooms.
The bedroom (north) side of the house is still more up in the air. It may take adding a third door to that side of the house, perhaps leading into the shared bathroom.
Well, solving those sorts of problems is why you hire architects, right?
Why do you think the fire danger would be increased? With walls & floors & ceilings basically of concrete/steel reinforcments, there would seem to be relatively little to sustain a fire.
I’ve been interested for years in having a home like the one you describe. From browsing through books and a lot of websites, I’ve gotten the impression that building an underground house with standard construction methods is really very expensive, because of all the concrete needed to hold back the weight of the dirt surrounding the house. One of the most common ways of getting around this is building round houses, apparently because the circle is just inherently stronger. That is why most of the earth sheltered houses you’ll find on the web are domes: you get the most interior volume for the amount you spend on the concrete walls.
One idea I’m very interested in is a series of arched tunnels out together to form a n atrium house with a central courtyard, because it makes simpler the problem of a roof that can hold all the dirt… I once got this company’s http://www.formworksbuilding.com catalog, and they mentioned tunnels being available to join their domes, but I don’t see any mention on their site, so they may not offer them any more,
Oh and her is a link to the Department of Energy’s page on Earth Sheltered houses: http://www.eere.energy.gov/erec/factsheets/earth.html. It give the pros and cons of the earth sheltered houses, mentions various construction methods and also brings up things like drainage and humidity control. There is also a nice bibliography.
If you do build a house like this, please post details!
This is when I really miss having that “location” field - the “every room must have two exits” is NOT a universal part of the fire code. I know it exists in Chicago, but where I live here in NW Indiana it does not.
So, StarvingButStrong needs to check the local codes for where he lives. One of the reasons that you tend to see unusual architecture like “earth sheltered” and underground homes in more rural areas is because heavily urban areas often have much stricter building codes that make it virtually impossible to build these things there.
Maybe so; I just wouldn’t want to be down a hole when a fire starts. I’ve seen a small house filled with smoke when a kitchen trash can caught fire, and I felt lucky that it hadn’t moved to the counters and roof before I got out. Smoke inhalation is the killer in home fires, and I could see a house filling with smoke from a burning kitchen or sofa before anyone woke. At that point, it would be a lot easier to find a window than the front door.
Beyond that, (and I’m no expert and I am speculating), you may want to discuss your plans with the local fire marshall as the fire department may refuse to enter a burning building that would trap them if the roof collapsed (with a thermal sink on top, it probably could be made to resist heat almost indefinitely, but how would they know?) Any fire you couldn’t control would be a total loss (due to smoke damage, if nothing else), and your insurance company would adjust your rates accordingly. You might not even be able to get coverage, and that would mean that you would have to build the home on cash.
On review, your atrium exit may be an answer, but I’m not the one to decide. Your local building and safety officials are.
I’m also fascinated by underground homes, and have seen a number of HGTV and TLC type specials on them. Often, the owner will put a little outbuilding up at ground level, like a very small one-bedroom house or just a glorified shack, to indicate that yes, the land is owned and used. This is frequently the entrance to the below-ground facility, in fact. It’s useful, in that it provides an insulated foyer rather than an exposed ground-level door that may leak, and it offers the psychological value of keeping people off what would otherwise appear to be unoccupied land.
You should check out the underground cities at Cappadocia in Turkey - amazing stuff.
The homes in Cober Pedyare not nasty, dirty, wet holes, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell nor dry, bare, sandy holes with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: they are Aussie miners holes, and that means comfort.
