Northern Lights

Tree-Houses – impermanent structures, but the best ones remain with us as nostalgic memories.

The playful forms of Northern Lights have drawn from these memories and associations as a response to our clients’ brief for a creative studio space and retreat.

Northern Lights, however, is a ‘tree-house’ designed to last, and to withstand the extreme conditions that beachfront locations bring.

Within the expressive concrete frame a driveway providing valued off street parking becomes a wave that roofs the studio space beneath. The rawness of the concrete is paired with natural hardwoods and cedar.

Internally, the simple studio space echoes the rawness of the external form, with the organically textural furnishings a direct response to the immediately present landscape.

A mature cheese-tree, almost within reach from the hovering balcony, keeps the sense of the nostalgic tree-house alive and frames the view of the beach beyond, through native angophoras and palms.