Most old caves do not have anything built onto the front of them, i.e. they consist only of cave rooms set into the ground. The main, and important, advantage of this type of layout is that the rooms maintain a more consistent temperature summer and winter. This is because the external walls at the front of the cave are usually massively thick, sometimes two metres or more only penetrated by a door and a couple of small windows. The thermal insulation properties of these cave walls are extraordinarily high.
The principal disadvantage of this cave house design is that with the limited number of deeply set windows the rooms will appear quite dark (especially compared to modern conventional housing). While we all love the constant temperature we also like the light offered by thinner walls and bigger windows and so almost all cave renovations now include the addition of one or more rooms at the front of the cave, thus forming a cave house. These additional rooms almost always include a kitchen and bathroom.
