Scorpio House

Scorpio House is a nuclear-resistant shelter construction system developed by BXB studio. The uniqueness of our solution lies in redefining a shelter as an investment intended not just for times of threat.

Scorpio House is a luxury item that delights us daily, much like a sports car or a family yacht. Just as a utilitarian ship used for transport evolved into a separate category of luxury product—a yacht—we elevate the utilitarian nuclear bunker to the level of a luxurious space where we can pursue our passions and dreams.

It’s a modular, easily transportable, and quickly deployable system that you can configure in the BXB studio just like purchasing a new car model. Based on developed repetitive elements, we can create any size and function, such as a wine cellar, home cinema, music room, luxury spa, or meeting place. At the same time, it is an NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical) resistant space that ensures safety in case of pandemics, cataclysms, and war.

The scorpion is the largest creature on our planet capable of surviving a nuclear attack, hence the name of our system. We first began working on a traditional shelter of over 400 square meters in 2014, during the construction of a large residence. Over the years, we observed reluctance and hesitation from our clients regarding the justification for investing significant funds in building a shelter that, by definition, should never be needed. This led to the idea of redefining the concept of a shelter as a more accessible and multifunctional luxury product. Thus, Scorpio House was born from experience and extensive specialist knowledge. Scorpio House is a project on which the entire BXB studio team worked, including the technical, creative, interior design, and managerial-administrative departments. Today, we can confidently say that we are an architectural office specializing not only in designing traditional buildings, houses, and residences but also in shelters.

We decided to focus on the topic of shelters at BXB studio, recognizing it as an area overlooked by the architectural community in Poland and worldwide. We are an architectural studio where a completely new definition of shelters—Scorpio House—was created. We dispelled the dark image of bunkers and created carefully crafted architecture in terms of engineering, technology, aesthetics, and ideology.

Our project addresses significant social issues. With the Scorpio House system, we change the emotional nature of this type of architecture, which has negative connotations. We can say that we are demystifying dark wartime bunkers, giving shelters a human, universal, and accessible dimension. Scorpio House completely reverses the perception of shelters and even creates a trend for owning them. This, in turn, will lead to grassroots initiatives in the form of private investments in such structures, significantly increasing the safety of the social fabric in our country in case of crisis situations, not only military attacks but also extreme weather events or pandemics. It is worth mentioning that there are countries capable of securing shelter space for all their citizens. These include Switzerland and Finland. Sweden has such facilities for 70% of its population, Norway for 50%, and geopolitically disadvantaged Poland for only 3.8%.

Scorpio House Interiors

The advanced technology of the Scorpio House shelter is discreetly hidden and imperceptible to the daily user. The interior designs of Scorpio House offer uniquely designed, friendly spaces filled with light, natural materials, and even greenery.

Through design interventions, we create diverse scenography tailored to selected functions, crafting the ambiance of daytime and nighttime spaces. Unlike other similar structures, we do not imitate external windows but instead create a sense of natural light penetration into the interior through carefully designed apertures, louvers, or ceilings. This builds the atmosphere of morning, afternoon, evening, or night, stimulating the intensity and color of light. In the interiors of Scorpio House, we create the appropriate acoustics and atmosphere suited to the chosen function.

Another feature of our interiors is the ability to configure the space in various ways. A given room can be multifunctional. Through quick and simple user configurations, a room can serve as, for example, a bedroom, wine cellar, meeting place, and home theater simultaneously. The small-area variants of Scorpio House have ergonomic spaces optimized through our carefully designed arrangements and well-chosen furniture.