Grizzo Studio Threads a Concrete and Stone House Between Thirty-Nine Trees in the Cariló Forest

Most forest houses claim to respect the trees and then clear a generous rectangle anyway. Treinta y Nueve Árboles, a 582 m² house in Cariló, Argentina, by Grizzo Studio, takes its name from the count of mature trees on the plot. That count is the brief. The house had to fit around every one of them, and the site was not regraded to make the job easier.

The result is a stack of board-formed concrete volumes lifted on curving rubble-stone walls, wrapped in places by vertical timber slats. What makes it worth your attention is the way that discipline shapes the plan. The house reads less as an object placed in a forest and more as a set of surfaces bent around trunks and canopies. The architects call it an atrium for looking at nature. Read that loosely, and it is a fair description of how the house organizes movement: one route runs lengthwise through the forest, and another climbs through it.

Arriving Below the Canopy

The entrance is partially sunken, and the house uses that to set the tone. You approach along a rough stepped path between stone retaining walls, under a concrete overhang that curves overhead. Ferns and low light fill the gap. It is a compressed, earthy arrival, closer to entering a ravine than walking up to a front door.

The curve matters. Where the roof slab bends, the timber slats follow it, and a soffit that could have been a flat ceiling becomes a guide that turns you toward the glazing. Looking up from the path, the concrete edge cuts a clean line against the sky and the ginkgo branches. The architecture holds back and lets the trees supply the detail.

A Base of Rubble Stone

The stone walls do the most important work in the project, and they get the least credit. They curve rather than run straight, and the obvious reading is that they bend to clear root zones and trunks, not to follow a grid. Their rubble texture ties the house to the ground plane, which in this forest is covered in climbers and leaf litter.

Above that base the concrete cantilevers out, so the heavy, rough material stays low and the cleaner volumes float over it. It is a familiar strategy, but here it has a clear purpose: the upper floors can reach past the stone without adding more footprint at grade, where the roots are.

Concrete Volumes That Step Between Trunks

Seen from the garden, the house is a set of stacked boxes, each shifted to clear a different tree. The board-formed finish keeps the concrete from looking clinical. The grain of the formwork echoes the bark of the ivy-wrapped pines a few metres away, and under overcast light the two surfaces sit close in tone.

The cantilevered slabs are thin at the edge and project well past the walls below. Glass balustrades keep the upper terraces from adding visual weight. We would have liked to see how the structure carries these overhangs. The published material is quiet on that, and the drawings suggest the moves are more ambitious than they look in the photographs.

Timber as Screen and Shadow

Timber appears in two ways: as cladding on the lower walls and as free vertical fins that screen the glazing. The fins are the more interesting of the two. Inside the stair, they throw stripes of sunlight across the concrete treads and the stone walls beyond, doing on a small scale what the canopy does outdoors.

The slats have weathered to a silver grey that sits easily against board-marked concrete. This is a palette that accepts ageing. In a forest setting, where moss, ivy and leaf stain are inevitable, that is the realistic choice.

Courtyard, Ginkgo and the Rooms Around It

An internal courtyard anchors the plan, and a young ginkgo stands at its centre. In autumn it turns bright yellow, and the bedrooms are glazed floor to ceiling to face it. A round concrete column and a white curtain are almost the only interior gestures in these shots. The tree is the focal point, as it should be.

The semi-covered living area and the deep concrete walkways extend the rooms outward without fully enclosing them. A built-in bench on the covered terrace, scattered with fallen leaves, says a lot about the project's priorities. Outdoor space here is not a deck added to the house. It is part of the house, cut back into the trees.

The House Seen from the Forest

Step back onto the lawn and the strategy becomes legible. The house is partly hidden behind trunks in almost every view, and the stepped massing stays below the canopy line. Long shadows from the pines cross the concrete in the late afternoon, so the facade changes with the light filtering through the trees.

There is no single hero elevation. That may frustrate anyone who wants an iconic image, but it is the honest consequence of letting thirty-nine trees set the rules.

Plans and Drawings

The plans show the tree canopies drawn as if they were walls, and in effect they are. The ground floor holds the garage and services, with a path winding between trees. The middle level gathers kitchen, living, dining and two bedrooms around a central stair. The top floor carries two suites and a large roof terrace that puts you among the crowns.

The section is the key drawing. A sloping stair ramp ties the three levels together, and it makes the vertical route explicit: you move from the roots at the sunken garage up to the treetops at the terrace. The elevations confirm the logic seen in the photographs, a stone base below and slatted, cantilevered volumes above.

Why This Project Matters

Tree preservation is usually a constraint that architects negotiate down. Grizzo Studio treated it as the generator of the plan instead, and the project shows how far that can go: curved walls, shifted volumes, a sunken entry and a vertical route that reads the forest in layers. The house is not modest in size, but it is modest in how it occupies the ground.

For anyone building in wooded suburbs, the lesson is practical. Count the trees first, draw them as fixed elements, and let the house adapt. The material palette helps the strategy work, because concrete, rubble stone and weathered timber can share a site with ivy and bark without competing. Treinta y Nueve Árboles makes a convincing case that the site's existing life can set the terms of the architecture.

Treinta y Nueve Árboles by Grizzo Studio (lead architects Lucila Grizzo, Federico Grizzo and Rocío Martínez Serra; design team Juana Gabba and Lucia Minnitti), Cariló, Argentina. Area: 582 m². Year: 2026. Photography by Mariano Imperial.

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