Skara Brae is a Neolithic village on a treeless, wind-scoured coast in Scotland's Orkney Islands. With almost no timber available, the environment forced the house to be built entirely in stone — as both structure and fittings — and the result is a rare whole in which architecture and interior are never separated.

The houses were built sunk into a communal midden mound. This mass both insulates and braces the structure against the wind; the walls rise in mortarless, corbelled courses of flat stone slabs. The houses are linked by narrow roofed passages — so the village is formed not of separate doorways but of an internal circulation network.

The truly remarkable part is the interior. In each house the furniture too is stone and fixed in place: a shelved "stone dresser" set against the wall directly opposite the entrance; stone bed frames to either side; a sunken hearth at the centre; storage recesses and cells in the walls, with hollows for watertight vessels. None of these fittings is movable — each is built into the fabric. Skara Brae thus shows that architecture can be not a shell but a complete instrument for living, designed together with its interior; together with a stone drainage system, it is among the most complete Neolithic dwellings, where plan, structure, and interior fittings were raised as one.