Forest House is a residence on the Atlantic Coast by Studio Razavi + Partners, set within a stand of century-old trees reaching above 30 meters. The tree canopy provided both the project's primary formal reference and its most significant constraint: the scale of the forest is vertical, and a house organized purely at horizontal scale would have nothing to say to it.

The plan is built from 2 identical squares shifted along a diagonal axis. That single move does several things at once: it maximizes usable floor area without expanding the overall footprint, it breaks the facades into a sequence of interrupted planes rather than 4 continuous elevations, and it opens sightlines from one volume through to the other. The house reads differently from every approach angle, not because the form is complex, but because the displacement compounds across plan, section, and silhouette.

The roof lines extend upward, pulling the facades into tall, narrow proportions that respond directly to the verticality of the surrounding trunks. The darkened cladding, nearly black, absorbs the tonal register of bark and filtered shadow rather than reading against it. The house does not try to be read separately from the forest; it is calibrated to recede into the conditions around it at the level of proportion and surface color, while remaining legible as a building.