Full of daylight, dry and quiet. Designed and built by us since 2010.
Open day Sat 24 Oct · Častkovce9:00 · 11:00 · 14:00 · 16:00Sign upThe idea
A Talpa house is cast as a single, continuous piece of waterproof concrete, with no separate waterproofing membrane. We cover it with earth, which insulates the house, stores months of solar heat, and becomes a living roof. Large south-facing windows fill the rooms with light. No machines do the work. The ground does it instead.
Walls and roof are cast as one waterproof piece. The concrete itself keeps the water out.
The soil on the roof insulates the house and keeps summer’s heat for the winter.
Full-height glass faces south. The sloped ceiling carries daylight to the back of the room.
Air comes in at the windows and leaves through pipes in the roof. No fan, no electricity.
Rain soaks through the roof, is collected under the house, cleaned and returned to the ground.
A steady temperature, summer and winter, with almost nothing to run.
The three questions everyone asks
01
No, and this is where cheap underground homes fail. A leak below ground is not a repair, it is an excavation. That is why every Talpa shell is cast as one piece of waterproof concrete with a crystalline admixture that closes its own hairline cracks on contact with water. There is no waterproofing membrane to age and tear, which removes the most common failure point of underground building. Measured indoor humidity holds between 45 and 65 percent all year.
45–65 %indoor humidity, measured all year
The first two years were a little humid, like any new build. Now it holds around 50 percent and stays stable.
Talpa House owners
02
No. Living rooms sit behind a wall of south-facing glass, the ceiling slopes to carry daylight 6 to 8 metres into the plan, and light wells reach the back rooms. One of our homes has a single window 17.5 metres long.
6–8 mhow deep daylight reaches into the rooms
There is often more light in the living room than we actually need.
Talpa House owners
03
The opposite. The earth stores months of solar heat, so the interior stays at 15 to 18 degrees in winter with no heating at all. A Talpa house heats for about 90 days a year, against roughly 270 for a conventional house. As Martin put it on Czech radio: you start heating before Christmas and finish in January.
~90heating days a year, against about 270 in a conventional house
The system
55 % recycled
Walls and roof cast as one continuous pour of waterproof, self-sealing concrete, made with about 55 percent recycled aggregate and validated with STU Bratislava. The concrete is the waterproofing. No membrane, and around 30,000 euros saved.
21–24 °C
The soil stores solar heat for two to three months, holding 21 to 24 degrees inside all year, and 24 to 25 even at 40 outside. The earth does the work of roughly 40 percent of the insulation.
Meadow
The land you build on comes back as a meadow on the roof. It holds the rain on your own plot, which authorities increasingly require, shields the shell from sun and frost, and leaves no roof covering to ever replace.
6–8 m
Living spaces and full-height glass to the south, a sloped ceiling carrying light deep into the plan, and not a single window on the cold north side.
0 fans
Fresh air in through the windows, through the house, out through rear roof pipes by chimney effect. No heat-recovery unit, no electricity, nothing to service or replace.
99 % cleaned
Rain filters through the roof soil, collects beneath the house and passes a root-zone cleaner removing about 99 percent of impurities. Roughly 90 percent of the water returns to the ground.
And because the house needs so little to begin with, taking it fully off the grid later is a choice you keep, not a rebuild. Doing less needs less: 12 to 16 kWp of solar, where a house full of machines needs 29 to 38.
See the full engineeringLiving underground
People notice the silence first. Then the light, moving through the rooms with the day. Then the calm of a temperature that barely changes, summer or winter. This is not living in a basement. It is living inside a hillside, with the garden on your roof.
Step inside a Talpa houseIt is so quiet that sometimes we open the windows just to hear something.
Talpa House owners
Owner data
One family tracked their energy use as they learned to live with the house. It fell from 8.4 megawatt hours in the first year to 4.3 in the second, and below 4 in the third. This is not a projection. It is three years of their own meter readings.
Resilience
A house built into the earth simply has less to fear. In a storm there is no roof to tear away. If a tree falls, you remove the tree and level the earth. In a fire the shell is concrete and the cover is soil, and neither burns. In an earthquake the house moves with the ground instead of against it. And a house that can run on the sun keeps working when the grid does not.
Investment
A Talpa house that fully meets code costs about the same as an equally large new-build apartment of the same energy class. The difference comes afterwards. Bills measured in tens of euros a month, no heat pump or ventilation unit to ever replace, almost no exterior maintenance. And because the concrete is its own waterproofing, there is no membrane, which alone saves around 30,000 euros.
Houses
More than 20 homes across Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary, many on sloping plots other builders walked past. The best way to lose any doubt is to stand inside one.
Every house we have built or are building. Towns, not addresses, these are somebody’s homes.
How to start
How the houses are built, what owners measure and honest answers, in our journal.
Shape a home in the configurator and see an honest price range in minutes.
Once you have an estimate, we pressure-test your idea and your land together.
A paid, detailed study of your site and design. The fee is credited in full to your build.
We design, engineer, permit and build.
The founder
Martin Pribila read a book about underground houses while studying in Australia and could not let the idea go. He came home to Slovakia, designed a house, calculated the structure himself, and in 2010 built the first Talpa house for his own family. Visitors came, journalists came, orders followed. Fifteen years later he is an authorised structural engineer and site manager in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, develops recycled concrete with STU Bratislava, and still signs off every home. The green roof keeps rain on your own land. The water runs in a loop. The concrete gives an old material a second century of life.
About Talpa HouseIn contemporary architecture we often treat nature as our enemy. Choose the opposite, cooperate with it, and you find far more effective and truly sustainable solutions.
Martin Pribila · founder and structural engineer
Before you ask
Yes. What we have built since 2010 is what authorities increasingly require: low energy use, green roofs, water retention and natural materials.
No. The earth and passive ventilation do that work, proven with PHPP modelling rather than the standard calculation.
Across Europe. Completed homes stand in Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary, and we are expanding into the German-speaking countries and Italy.
Tell us about your site and what you want to build. A feasibility study turns the idea into a real, costed plan for your specific plot, and the fee comes straight off your build.
No pressure, no sales calls out of the blue. You choose the next step.
