While troglodytic architecture has been widely documented in garden and decoration treatises, it has rarely been considered as having an architectural value since the Renaissance period. The focus of the discipline of history of architecture on the architect and his role as a constructor partly explains this neglect. In this article, I start by showing the way troglodytic architecture was theorized and understood from the Renaissance period. Artificialized grottoes constituted a set in which the visitor was supposed to feel transported in fantasy. In a second step, I present its reappropriation by contemporary architects as a dwelling solution respecting the Genius Loci and offering alternative solutions to face sustainability issues. A tentative explanation of the attractiveness of this architecture for owners and tourists is finally proposed. Such architectural shapes are actually more and more visible in blockbuster movies: the world of fantasy, however, has become a suitable place for habitat.