Designing Around Nature

The wood accent wall totally makes this room POP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Having a house in the nature is beautiful but designing a house on a site 90% covered in mature pohutukawa trees can be a real challenge. Herbst Architects are the ones that made this beautiful house to fit perfectly between the chosen trees. Under Pohutukawa House talks about sensitivity and poetry, it is like the trees grew to protect the house. Except the destruction of a couple of trees that stopped the team to do their job, the nature dictated the architectural plan as it is: the private and the public area are small individual masses, separated; then for the private functions of bedrooms and garage were build two towers from the removed trees.

In order to look that the towers have the same skin with the stumps, they were painted in black/brown. If the exterior of the house was connected with the nature they had to do this with the interior too so they made the walls look as carved out of the cut wood. The two towers are connected by the public space and their roof is a continuous plan with the tree canopy. For a better connection with the nature, the public space height is the same with the height of the trees, the walls and a part of the roof are made of glass so it seems that the trees are leaning over the house.