It is a long way from bustling, cosmopolitan Melbourne to the outback NSW town of White Cliffs, where residents have been living underground for a hundred years to escape the blistering summer heat.

Cree Marshall came to White Cliffs 27 years ago, and she is still living underground in the outback settlement with her husband, an experienced opal miner.

"I came here to write," she said. "And all these years later, I'm still here.

"I've always lived underground out here, my houses started off pretty rough and over the years they've got a bit flasher."

White walls with a splash of colour

Found objects, including fossils, embedded in a work of art in the walls of Cree Marshall's underground home. ( ABC Rural: Sally Bryant )

Ms Marshall's most recent house has a feel of a New York apartment, in the outback.

The house is built in an abandoned opal mine, which is reputed to have yielded millions of dollars worth of colour, including the prized white opal.

Ms Marshall is confident there is absolutely none left.

It is a study in white walls and patches of brilliant colour, quiet and still.

The solitude is something Ms Marshall has deliberately sought, a retreat from her formerly busy life as an inner-city interior designer.

The art of light

These intricate patterns are made by the tiny bones of snakes and small lizards, found in the White Cliffs area. ( ABC Rural: Sally Bryant )

She is now a practising artist and revels in the freedom she finds in the remote outback setting, and the raw materials her local environment offers — like the bones of native animals.

Ventilation underground is key, so there are no doors between the living spaces.

Instead privacy is created by corners and turns and the house gets light and fresh air through mine shafts reaching up through the rock to the sky above.

Additional lighting is provided by strategically placed downlights, focused on the quirky artworks Ms Marshall has created from found objects in her landscape.

Dominating kitchen

The white kitchen is flooded with natural daylight from the big glass windows; the opposite wall marks the beginning of the underground house. ( ABC Rural: Michael Condon )

You enter the 'dug-out' house through its huge light-filled kitchen — one side is all windows out over the community, the other side is the beginning of the old mine.

The kitchen roof is held up by an unusual central column, an entire tree trunk.

Her skill as an interior designer is obvious at every turn.

The actual area of the house itself is not enormous, but appears bigger because it winds around through the hill and doubles back on itself, a labyrinth of bedrooms and cosy retreats.

The community before you

The view from the top of a dug-out house; Cree Marshall shows ABC's Michael Condon her view over the community of White Cliffs. ( ABC Rural: Sally Bryant )

In the centre of the dug-out house, a spiral staircase rises through the rendered rock ceiling to a sunny room on the top of the hill.

From this glassed-in platform, you can see down over the community, the conventional buildings and the entrances to other dug-out houses.

And when you walk out on top of the house, and see the placement of skylights and shafts, you get a sense of how small an area this roomy little designer rabbit warren actually covers.