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This home, known as the "Tree house”, is perched on a steep forested hillside above the Great Ocean Road and Bass Strait in Victoria.

In designing the Tree house, architects Jackson Clements Burrows, drew on the modest local vernacular of 1950’s painted fibro shacks, by using cement sheets with expressed batten joints to dissolve the house into the surrounding landscape. The 2 tone green colour scheme used for the exterior helped to merge the building with the vegetation on the hillside on which it sits. The vertical timber battens on the building are a naturally stained timber, which will silver over time like the branches and trunks of trees in the bush surrounds.

The changing light and colours throughout the day further engage the home with its bushland context...

Via Lauren Moss

Located in a residential area in Hyogo Prefecture, the house was designed for a family with two children. “The residents requested that, as the area has short hours of sunlight in winter, they’d like to bring in as much light as possible,” said Yo Shimada of Tato Architects.

More from the architects:

I wanted to create light, stable indoor climate and came up with a plan of three sheds of house type arranged on a 1.8 m high foundation platform. The first floor was lowered by 760 mm below ground to optimize the heating system and regulate temperature, while preserving views to the surrounding mountains and sky for the entire residential neighborhood.

The bathroom shed and the sunroom shed provide lighting and ventilation for the lower floor and form an overhead courtyard. The sunroom collects heat in winter, and exhausts heat in summer through the five motor-operated windows.

Corrugated polycarbonate panels are used for outer walls of the three sheds to take in solar radiation, with moisture and water-absorbing sheets between the panels and structure.The inside of the walls are formed with a heat insulating layer, and the ceiling and walls of bathroom are further filled up with light transmitting thermal insulation material of reproduced PET bottles.

A house appearing as small as a peasant’s work shed of an innovative material as corrugated panels creates a new vernacular in this agricultural area. Read the article and view more photos of this very unique house that connects new and old within the rural landscape.

Via Lauren Moss