Wartime bomb shelter conceals a tiny and unexpected vacation home

A Nuclear winter won’t be the only reason you’ll want to stay in this Dutch wartime bunker.

Belgian architecture studio B-ILD converted the half-buried shelter into a tiny and unexpected holiday home in the Netherlands. Commissioned by the Belgian agency Famous, the refurbished bunker features an ascetic interior design that draws inspiration from Le Corbusier’s personal log cabin, Cabanon de Vacances.

Created as part of Famous’ advertising campaign, this unusual holiday home is now permanently open for rental accommodations. The concrete bunker is surrounded by rolling green hills and is located in Fort Vuren as part of the ‘Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie’ site. Due to the bunker’s tiny footprint—the usable surface for the main room only measures 9 square meters with a height of 1.8 meters—B-ILD could only fit the bare essentials. All of the furnishings are custom-made and multifunctional—furniture can fold or slide away—to allow optimal use of the small space.

Guests enter the bunker holiday home through a dark opening that leads to a kitchen built into a wall recess. A small doorway separates the kitchen from the main living room, which doubles as a bedroom lined with bunk beds. Meranti plywood was used to provide a bright contrast to the concrete walls and black steel materials. The architects also added an outdoor wood deck with a perimeter size that matches the outer circumference of the bunker.