Architects add green aesthetic to homes

By now, you may be familiar with biophilic design – it’s the idea of integrating nature into design to enhance our connection to the environment. Sustainability, wellness and harmony are usually part of the deal. Some architects and home designers are using one particular biophilic element to striking effect: trees.

We’ve already seen public spaces around the globe incorporate trees in remarkable and beautiful ways. The Ford Foundation in New York boasts a 12-story-high atrium filled with magnolias, eucalyptus, jacaranda, cryptomeria, iron bark and pear trees. The Winter Garden atrium in lower Manhattan’s Brookfield Place is home to 16 40-foot-tall Washingtonia palm trees.

Singapore’s Jewel Changi airport features 2,500 trees – natives to Madagascar, Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia – in a 6-acre indoor forest with walking trails. If your flight’s delayed, lucky you. Apartment complexes also have seen some striking examples of trees and other greenery incorporated into their design –- the buildings are sometimes called “greenscrapers,” according to the Associated Press.

For instance, architect Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale in Milan is a 44-storey tower with 800 trees and myriad shrubbery enveloping each unit. In the Netherlands, he built the Trudo Vertical Forest, a low-income apartment tower with trees growing on all four facades.

Private houses are also getting the arboreal love. In some, the tree’s brought right indoors. In others, trees on the property are included as important partners in the home plan.

Whether it’s building the home around an existing tree, planting one (or more) trees within the interior space, or simply giving the illusion of a woodland indoors, the aesthetic is green and gorgeous. New York-based firm ODA Architecture created a penthouse home for a client in New Delhi that has a closed courtyard at its centre with a reflecting pool and a ficus microcarpa tree. Raindrops land on the glass ceiling and are reflected in the infinity-edged pool the tree resides in, truly giving an indoor/outdoor vibe.

The tree lives in multiple feet of soil and is supported to prevent damage to the home. The level below had high ceilings, which allowed the architects to drop the floor and establish space for the tree roots to grow, the AP report adds. KAA Design Group in Los Angeles created a modern home in Southern California that embraces the property’s existing cork oaks, rare Torrey pines and magnolias. An impressive mature cork oak sits center stage. Leaving it in place took a bit of a sell, says one of the firm’s founding partners, Grant Kirkpatrick. The driveway, too, offers a Zen moment, with a black pine pruned in the Japanese niwaki style with more open branching, and a miniature rock garden emerging out of the paving like an organic sculpture.

On an upper floor, you can look out onto a grassy platform built around the gnarled branches of one of the oaks. Views out of the sliding glass doors of the open-plan kitchen and dining area are framed by tree limbs, and the ocean is on the horizon.

The landscape teams of John Mini Distinctive Landscapes and Pahokee Palms, who installed the Brookfield Place palms, did just that: after the young trees were dug up in Florida, they spent some time under the protective cover of a 48-food-high shade house, so they could adjust to light conditions in New York.

The palms in the Brookfield space need to be replaced every 10 years or so, because living indoors, they aren’t exposed to elements, becoming weaker as they get taller. Once removed, the old trees are turned into mulch. Sixteen new Washingtonia Robusta palms are sourced in Florida, shipped up in groups of four by truck, and planted at Brookfield Place. The mulch is settled around native trees planted in their honour in places like serenity gardens at local hospitals.