Miner's House, Idrija, Miners' house in Idrija, Slovenia

The Miner's House in Idrija is a late 18th-century wooden house on stone foundations, built for miners and their families. Its exterior walls are boards covered with laths, plastered and whitewashed with lime, and the steep roof is clad in fir shingles called šinklni so snow slides off. The multi-storey building has many small windows and a white facade.

The house is a late 18th-century miner's dwelling, opened to visitors by the Idrija City Museum in 2002. Such houses were built on the town's slopes for miners, while the bourgeois class lived in the centre. Most were demolished after the Second World War; only a few remain, though almost every house in Idrija was built in this style 50 years earlier.

The house is a rare surviving example of the Idrija miners' dwellings, built almost entirely of wood on stone foundations, with whitewashed board walls and a steep roof of fir shingles called šinklni. Each floor was rented to a separate family, while the owner lived on the ground floor. The renovated house from the late 18th century opened to visitors in 2002 as part of the Idrija City Museum.

The house stands on a slope above the town centre, a short walk uphill from Idrija's main streets and bus station. Visits are organised through the Idrija Municipal Museum, which opened the furnished house to the public in 2002; the museum also runs the nearby Gewerkenegg Castle. The lanes around it are steep and cobbled, so sturdy shoes help.

By the early 1900s, up to 18 people lived in this single house, including young miners from surrounding areas who lodged there while working. Families displayed remarkable ingenuity by converting furniture into beds, using drawers and wooden benches for sleeping to cope with severe space constraints.