Excerpt: Bird Houses by Alexis Dornier is an architectural project consisting of three elevated structures surrounding a shared pool and sundeck. The design features fluid walkways, water elements, and flower beds that seamlessly blend with the surrounding environment. Large, preserved trees provide natural shading and privacy while also forming a canopy for outdoor lounging areas, creating a landscape that resembles a small park.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] 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 composed 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 surroundings.
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.
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