Thinking Outside the Rocks

rock house front

This tiny house of boulders and stones and located in the mountains of Fafe, Portugal and surrounded by wind turbines. While the photos look a little like imitations this is in fact a real home. This is an excellent example of building a home from local materials and reminds me of the ancient cliff dwellings in the American southwestern deserts.

I’m sure a house like this with a little passive solar design mixed in would be incredibly successful considering the massive amount of thermal mass the rocks would provide. This one appears to have very small barred openings designed more for security than sustainability and would certainly stay fairly cool inside all year long; unless a fire (or heater of some kind) was kept burning in the winter of course.

I sure love the idea of building a tiny home into a grouping of rocks like this though, especially if the rest of the structure was made from rocks lying around the building site. Read more about this stone house on dornob. Photo credit Jsome1 on Flickr.

rock house back

rock house wind turbine

rock house man walking

Similar Posts

9 Comments

  1. I LOVE your tiny house designs and especially this Outside the Rocks one. Keep up the good work of turning people on to tiny houses. They are the best.

  2. I think this place is amazing. I would give anything to create a home that was this much a part of the earth. I wish our tight zoning laws would allow for this kind of thing to be more easily built in the US. I’d love to see more

  3. I believe the bars on the windows are probably due to whatever the structure is that holds/supports the cement type aggrigate walls together- like rebar, or panels *(reminds me of cattle panels fencing). Seems it would pose an escape threat were there an emergency – the windows don’t seem an escape route.

  4. Permit, what permit? Just move existing site rocks together as you ostensibly ‘clear your site’ then over them over with a roof structure. My twenty acres is almost all ‘rim rock’. I could probably do something like this with enough dozer time

    Very interesting, as Sgt Shultz was fond of saying.

    Flintstones, meet the Flintstones..oh, yeah, thanks Michael.

  5. I love this house. I have seen it in the emails and never forgot it. I wish we could build this way… my county is quite strict.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.