Koala Haven: A Rehabilitation Centre That Curves Around Trees and Puts Koalas Before People

Most buildings ask their occupants to adapt. Koala Haven reverses that contract. Its starting premise is that a wildlife rehabilitation centre should bend to the scale, habits and sensory world of the animal it treats, rather than forcing an injured koala to recover inside a conventional clinic. The result is a building that reads less like a medical facility and more like a carefully drawn line through an existing landscape, one that protects the trees koalas depend on and keeps human activity at a respectful distance.

Designed by 依洋 李, the project was shortlisted in Haven 2020. Set within a natural landscape, the proposal combines a treatment and rehabilitation centre with visitor and educational facilities. Its central argument is that healing is environmental as much as clinical: recovery depends on reduced stress, familiar surroundings and the chance to return to natural behaviours, and the architecture is organised to deliver all three.

A Treatment Room Where the Koala Sits at the Centre of the Section

The section collage makes the project's priorities legible at a glance. A koala rests on a treatment bed inside a glazed care room, attended by a doctor, while a walkway runs overhead. The layering matters: clinical work happens at ground level in close contact with the landscape, while movement is lifted above and kept apart from it. The glazing keeps the room visually connected to its surroundings, which suits the project's insistence that the setting is part of the treatment.

This is the brief's core tension expressed in a single cut. Humans must be present for treatment, yet their presence is a source of stress. Separating care space from circulation through section, not just through plan, is a sensible way to let both happen within the same footprint.

Framed Openings That Turn Visitors Into Quiet Observers

On the public side, the architecture shifts from enclosure to framing. A concrete opening looks onto a green meadow where koalas sit in the trees, and a lone visitor stands facing the view. The frame sets the terms of engagement: people look out across distance rather than moving in close. It is a modest device, but it carries the project's ethical position, since education happens through observation rather than contact.

The lounge space extends that idea into something more restful. Visitors recline beneath a rough concrete ceiling punctured by oval skylights, beside a timber slat screen draped in hanging vines. The material palette is deliberately split, heavy concrete overhead and lighter timber at the edge, so the room feels grounded while its boundary stays porous to light and planting. Visitors are invited to slow down and remain still, which is precisely the behaviour a rehabilitation site needs from them.

Curving Walls That Leave the Meadow Largely Intact

The exterior rendering shows the building's defining gesture: curving concrete walls and timber slat screens set within a misty green meadow, with koalas on the lawn. Instead of clearing the site for a compact block, the designer threads curvilinear forms around existing vegetation and mature tree groups. Those walls do several jobs at once, guiding movement, forming sheltered courtyards and observation points, and dividing the site into two zones.

That division is the scheme's organising logic. A secluded rehabilitation zone stays close to the landscape and largely free of human activity, while a visitor and educational zone sits nearer public access routes. Because the separation is made by the building's own geometry, the architecture doubles as a buffer. The low, flowing massing also reduces visual dominance, so the structure reads as an extension of the terrain rather than an object placed on it.

A Plan Drawn From the Height of the Trees

The drawing sheet reveals the method behind the renders. A tree height diagram sits alongside an exploded axonometric and first and second floor plans of the winding building. Including the tree study on the same sheet as the plans signals that the canopy was a design input rather than a backdrop. For an animal that lives in trees, vertical habitat is the real site, and the building's two levels are set out in relation to it.

The plans confirm what the perspectives suggest: the building is a continuous, meandering line rather than a cluster of rooms, which lets it slip between tree groups and wrap around open space. The exploded axonometric breaks that line into its parts, making it clear how the walls, screens and floors combine to separate animal and human territories.

Why This Project Matters

Koala Haven belongs to a growing body of work that treats architecture as a restorative tool rather than a purely human service. Its most valuable move is defining the client correctly. By designing around koala behaviour, stress and habitat first, and fitting human programme around those constraints, the project arrives at a building whose form follows from care rather than from typology.

The scheme is strongest where its ideas become spatial: walls that bend to keep trees standing, a section that lifts people above recovering animals, framed openings that teach visitors to watch from a distance. As a shortlisted Haven 2020 entry, it makes a persuasive case that conservation architecture succeeds when it knows when to step back.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: 依洋 李

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Project credits: Koala Haven by 依洋 李 Haven 2020 (uni.xyz).