A cool and breezy home, especially those that capture a beautiful green outside view – whether it’s in the mountains, jungle, or any great landscape – must be many people’s dreams.
It does not always have to take up a huge chunk of your budget, but as a bottom line, building an ideal home will need you to think about smart choice of composition on the interior, exterior, and furnishing also to in the end make a harmonious coming together.
Capturing the beauty of the surrounding nature like plants, trees, and garden around you becomes an additional element that makes for a dream house. Because of that, it is important to care for those living beings – the plants and the trees – so that they stay alive as long as possible. It is saddening that whenever someone aims to have a futuristic style building, they would immediately get rid of greeneries; when in fact these greeneries are the very thing that makes the whole building look a lot more lively, livable, and have a life on its own. So keep that in mind – modern does not mean natureless.
Take this house as an example – Kawakawa House in New Zealand is built in the middle of a jungle-like setting but with a view to a beach in Piha. Kawakawa House is a residential project by Herbst Architects, a studio based in Auckland. With such amazing views, the architects used a lot of concrete, wood, and black steel to blend in with nature but also to facilitate the view as the focal point.
Even more unique, the canopy of the house is designed using Pōhutukawa tree – a type of tree native to New Zealand. In fact, the tree is often used as an architectural material. No wonder why the property looks very natural – because of the use of natural wood and other materials that go hand in hand with the surrounding landscape.
There are of course a number of benefits when we design a house like this. Amongst them are: we can prolong the lives of ourselves, of the surrounding landscape, and the earth because it is such an eco-friendly approach to building that the trees we encourage having around us produce oxygen. On top of that, it is great for our health and mental wellbeing, as looking at nature is often associated with clearer and more refreshed minds. It restores our concentration and calms us down. Finally it also minimizes our budget when building. When we use as many natural materials as possible and make use of natural systems like natural ventilation, daylighting, we will not be using as much electricity and so in the end building in nature and with nature will be more economical afterall.
