This coastal home in New Zealand was built under the pohutukawa trees in Piha on the west coast of Auckland. Awarded ‘Home of the Year’ by the New Zealand Architect Institute, it was designed to respond to the constraint of 90% of the land being already occupied by mature forest.
For Herbst architects, the answer was to listen to the land. Rather than trying to tame it, or sweep it aside, the architects chose to let the forest shape the house, both in form and feeling.
Instead of a single, imposing structure, the house is broken into smaller parts—each designed to sit lightly among the trees. The bedrooms were placed in two vertical towers that reference the trees that once stood in their place. The exterior is clad in textured dark battens, while inside features the same finish on some walls, while other walls, ceilings and cabinetry are lined in honey-toned timber, giving a sense of being cocooned in the forest.
Between these two towers are the living, kitchen and dining spaces which lie within an open space that acts like a clearing in the forest, with a blurring of the boundary between inside and out. A large, wing-like roof floats over this space, connecting the towers and mimicking the tree canopy above, letting light filter through like leaves catching sun. There’s something beautifully poetic about it, this idea that the roof dissolves back into forest rather than cutting it off.
“From the road, this beach house, in its opened-up summer configuration, reads as an encampment; up close, it is experienced as a beautifully sited verandah. The house is a beguiling essay in the relationship between structure and setting, order and nature, requirements and responsibilities. There is nothing extempore about the building, which is designed and executed with perfectionist exactitude, but it is also a highly successful exercise in sympathetic placement: the pohutukawa among which the house politely nestles are constantly and closely present. An iconic beach has been graced with an exquisite house.“ – NZ architecture institute awards jury.
Light plays a huge role in this space. With generous glazing and even sections of glass roof, the house doesn’t just sit beneath the canopy—it’s bathed in it. You can feel the presence of the trees at every moment. They lean in, casting dappled shadows across floors and walls, shifting with the day and the season. It’s immersive in the best way. The building invites you to experience the forest from within, to see how light and structure and nature can interact instead of compete.
The walkway that links the two towers at the upper level offers a something akin to a treetop experience. Up there, you’re held between the built and the wild—the timber-framed geometry of the house below and the reaching limbs of pohutukawa above.
This is not just a house in the forest, it’s a house of the forest, with every detail a quiet tribute to the trees lost, respecting place, and serves as a cogent reminder that good design doesn’t impose. Sometimes, it listens first.
