Menir House is a ideal beach home. It started out as a proposal for a competition that was never submitted, but we liked the idea: A house shaped like a rock sitting under an umbrella on the beach.

The house is a portable vacuum-formed polyurethane shell that once filled with sea-water sits on the sand like those water filled umbrella bases. While the water-filled shell provides weight and natural insulation, the photovoltaic umbrella is custom-made to fold-up, flip-up and become a wind turbine, serving basic energy needs and allowing the experimental house to be lived-in off the traditional energy grid. 

Menir house is at once primitive and futuristic, actual and virtual. It represents an escape from everyday reality similar to a vacation, a day spent inside a beach cave, listening to the waves and watching the horizon. At the same time it is a proposal for a realistic, sustainable, portable and energy independent beach home.