Everyone has their own way of losing their mind — just a little.
Some take up obscure hobbies, others grow forests on balconies, and a few start building things they can’t fully explain. But when you live in a tiny apartment, it’s hard to give your creativity room to run wild. The walls are too close. The neighbors are too curious. The imagination stays locked away.
But once you have a backyard?
That’s where the quiet madness begins.
And for Tomas, a quiet man in a quiet neighborhood, that madness arrived in the shape of a two-meter-wide concrete ring and a rented excavator.
The Ring Appears
At first, it looked like a standard home project. A delivery truck dropped off a concrete cylinder. Then a hole began to appear in the middle of Tomas’s lawn — deep and precisely shaped.
Curious neighbors started watching from windows and across fences.
Then came whispers.
— “It’s a water tank.”
— “It’s a storm drain.”
— “He’s building a bunker.”
— “Maybe he’s part of something… secret.”
Tomas said nothing. He nodded politely at passersby, kept working, and eventually lowered the ring vertically into the hole. He carefully packed soil around it, leveled the top, and then — with astonishing precision — tiled a perfect circle of stone over it.
At the center of that tiled surface: a small steel hatch.
The Routine Begins
Then things got stranger.
Every evening, Tomas would open the hatch and release a puff of steam. Sometimes he disappeared down into it for half an hour, emerging later with damp hair and a calm expression.
Someone swore they saw him carrying wires and a thermometer. Another thought they heard a low humming sound at night. By week two, the entire street was watching — and guessing.
No one really knew what to think.
Until one neighbor finally asked, and Tomas, smiling, answered:
“It’s a vertical sauna.”
A Sauna Unlike Any Other
Tomas, it turned out, wasn’t crazy. He was an engineer. And he had spent the last year designing a one-person, underground, vertically-aligned sauna that used natural heat dynamics and minimal surface space.
His explanation was simple:
“Above ground, everything is noisy. Everything demands your attention. I didn’t want to go somewhere to relax. I wanted to create a space where the world couldn’t reach me. Not even visually.”
The concrete ring housed a vertical chamber lined with heat-treated wood. A built-in ladder led down to a small wooden bench. An insulated steam system, powered from an outdoor unit, generated controlled heat and humidity. No Wi-Fi. No notifications. Just breath and heat and silence.
Why Go to All That Trouble?
When someone asked why he didn’t just install a prefab sauna or go to a wellness center, Tomas replied:
“Because this is not for anyone else. It’s not for show. I built it for me. And the feeling of stepping down into the earth, closing the hatch above you, and sitting in stillness… is like returning to yourself.”
The Neighborhood Reacts
At first, people laughed. Then they were intrigued. And before long, they were inspired.
A few started small backyard projects of their own — a soundproof shed for playing music, a reading nook hidden in the trees, a meditation circle made of stones. Not everyone built a sauna, but everyone started thinking: “What would I make, just for myself, if no one were watching?”
Why This Story Went Viral
Because it’s not about architecture, or wellness, or design.
It’s about permission.
The permission to build something for no other reason than it brings you peace.
The permission to carve out quiet in a noisy world.
The permission to create something unusual — and not care if anyone else understands it.
In a culture obsessed with productivity and visibility, Tomas buried a ring of silence beneath his own lawn. And it became his way of saying:
“Here, I belong to no one else but me.”