Location: Ubud, Bali
Typology: Residential
Guest House: 37.5 m²
Studio House: 128.6 m²
Main House: 162 m²
Status: Completed 2022
Architectural Design: Alexis Dornier
Construction: Surya Kembar
Photo Credit: Kie
Instagram: @Birdhousesbali
Website: Birdhouses-Bali
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A group of friends joined forces to build their dream of a floating village surrounded by a tropical forest in the heart of Bali. The project is composition of three stilted structures encompassing a shared pool and sundeck space designed through fluid shapes as walkways, water features and flower beds.
The largest building is nestled into a sloped site overlooking a small creek running past the property, while the studio and the guest house flank the entrance of the site. Together the structures create an ensemble that integrates into the existing foliage of large trees which were maintained to provide external shading and privacy.
The trees also become the canopy for outdoor resting places as part of a landscape design resembling a miniature park. These so-called birdhouses blend into nature, and their pivoting floor plans create expressive inhabitable sculptures that form exciting relationships to the outside, while being very present as memorable interpretations of the idea of a house.
The experience of exploring those structures is a journey through the three-dimensional, maze-like arrangement of their different spaces, all radiating out from their central vertical circulation elements into their surrounding. Carefully crafted openings create heterogeneous elevations to the buildings.
All rooms have varying heights and their dimensions span from compact to expansive. Windows have different formats to expose views onto the ground and into the sky.
The materiality of these inhabitable sculptures form a collage of solid volumes holding circulation elements and bathrooms, while the main spaces are textured in with their surfaces clad in wood from both the inside and the outside. Soft and indirect and integrated lighting conceives a cozy, inhabitable space, detached from the ground and glowing like a lantern in the midst of the lush Green.