The Qiyun Mountain Tree House, talking with the red cedars, by Bengo Studio

Timber-clad box are stacked vertically and rotated around a structural core, the central spiral staircase, to form this hotel in China's Anhui province. Its design gives guests to 360-degree views mountains covered of red cedars.

Exterior view. The Qiyun Mountain Tree House by Bengo Studio. Photograph © Chen Hao

The Tree House, a small hotel designed by Shanghai architecture office, Bengo Studio, tries to dialogue with its environment of red cedars, using the smallest trace on the forest. The height and the materials try to generate the smallest ecological footprint on the environment, in the Huangshan mountains.

Description of project by Bengo Studio

The Qiyun Mountain Tree House is located in the region of Xiuning County which is 33 kilometres south of Huangshan City, Anhui Province. As a part of the Qiyun Mountain Scenic Area, the tree house is surrounded by a sea of red cedars.

The 11-metre-tall tree house is of the same height as its neighboring mature-age red cedars. The house is a superposition of seven rooms as large as six to nine square meters, i.e., the entrance hall, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, the living room and the landscape room. The two sets of bedrooms and bathrooms are separated by the entrance hall, thus available for two families to live in at the same time without disturbing one another. The living room and the landscape room are built at the top of the house as public space. All seven rooms are connected by a spiral staircase in the center.

The house invites the guests in from the glass glazed gallery in the central layer leading to the entrance hall before they go upstairs/downstairs to the two sets of rooms. The guests get to each room by climbing up/down climbing 1.6 meters up/down the central spiral staircase. As they move to different parts of the house, a panoramic view of the forest is guaranteed, offering a unique visitor experience of enjoying the forest scene at different heights.

The rooms in the tree house are not big at all. In fact, they were designed to be extremely small. Yet, the glass window at one end of the room is as big as the entire wall that faces the view. Though the guests stay in a small room, their attention is drawn to a great expanse of forest outside the window.

The house is a steel-structure piece. The structural core of the central spiral staircase was first built, joined by the cantilevered room structure. Given the concern that wood from other regions might cause plant disease and insect pest to this area, red cedar wood was chosen as the façade material for the tree house.