No, this isn’t Hobbiton or a scene from Teletubbies. It’s a rendering of a community of earth-sheltered houses built from a new prefab building system. I once wrote that from Hobbiton to Tatooine, earth sheltered houses make sense all over the universe; now you can just order one up.Earth-sheltered houses have long been known to be very energy-efficient, with the thermal mass of all that dirt keeping the temperature relatively even all year. However they have often been expensive to build and difficult to make totally waterproof. Now a Florida company, Green Magic Homes, has designed a prefabricated system of fiber-reinforced polymers (FRP) where you can roll your own earth sheltered house at a reasonable price (US $41 per square foot for the shells). Their system addresses the problems of weight and cost: