Studio Krubka Folds a Butterfly Roof over a Courtyard Garden for a Thai Herbal Medicine Headquarters

Novolife makes natural pharmaceutical products from Thai herbs, so its headquarters had an obvious brief and an easy trap. The obvious brief was to make wellbeing visible. The trap was to do it with plants stuck to a generic office block. Bangkok-based Studio Krubka, led by architect Danai Surasa with co-founder Soyploy Phanich, avoided the trap. The result is an 890 m² concrete building in Bang Khae Nuea, on the western outskirts of Bangkok. It puts a courtyard garden at the center and arranges every office, meeting room and corridor so that staff have to deal with that garden as they move through the day.

Two things make the project worth close attention. The first is the roof: a bowed, butterfly profile whose two planes meet along a central spine, which the design diagrams identify as a rainwater channel. The second is the way the plan works. The workplace behaves like a semi-outdoor building, open to daylight, air and weather, and we read this as a serious climatic position rather than a marketing gesture. Thailand's tropical climate is not something to seal out at every turn, and this building takes that argument further than most corporate offices would.

A Heavy Concrete Face for a Company That Sells Lightness

From the street, the headquarters is more fortress than greenhouse. Board-formed concrete, deep fins and a cantilevered roof edge make a solid, shaded front. The symmetrical two-part elevation splits around a central stair, so the entrance acts as a gap between masses. You enter through the building rather than up to a door.

The weight makes sense. On a hot, bright site at the edge of the city, the fins and recessed openings shade the glass, and the closed outer face holds back what is inside. Olive trees, slate paving and low planted beds soften the approach without competing with the concrete. They also hint at the more cultivated landscape you reach once inside.

Curves, Fins and the Record of the Formwork

Up close, the concrete reads as shaped material rather than a flat surface. Corners turn in curves, a scooped cutout opens one wall to the sky, and the fins taper as they rise. The board marks and tie-hole patterns stay exposed, and raking sunlight across the curved entrance walls turns those marks into the main ornament of the facade.

Water does more than the drainage. A reflecting pool sits in front of deep-set glazing, and on the soffits you can see dappled reflections moving across beams and tapered columns. It is a small effect, but it shows how far the design carries its interest in climate into the details. The building gives you shade, water and moving light at the scale of a column head, not only at the scale of the roof.

A Courtyard Placed in Every Route

The courtyard is the core of the project. It is planted as a rock garden of mossy boulders, gravel and one leaning, twisted tree, which reads more like a contemplative Japanese garden than a tropical jungle. That restraint suits the program. A dense planting would have blocked the views; this one keeps sightlines open across the courtyard and leaves the tree as the single focal point.

The circulation under the board-marked arches is the strongest move in the plan. Walking to a meeting or the canteen means walking along the garden edge, half-sheltered and half outside. The circular opening above lets you look straight up past the canopy to the sky, which connects the ground-level garden to the roof overhead. The garden becomes part of how people get around, not a view kept for the director's office.

Arches, Portholes and Rooms That Face the Garden

The interior openings follow a clear geometry. Semicircular arches frame the courtyard from lounges and corridors, and a round green-framed window gives a two-chair nook its own small view of the rocks. Curved glass meeting rooms echo the rounded corners outside, so the building uses one consistent language of soft edges throughout.

The rooms keep turning back toward the garden. From a meeting room with a timber table, from the lounge with its curved white sofa, from the glass door of a smaller room lined with textured panels, the view ends at the same tree. Some will find this repetitive. We think it is the point. It makes clear what the company wants its staff to see: the greenery restores tired eyes between screens, and the building makes sure you look at it many times a day.

Working Under the Butterfly Roof

The open office floors are plain on purpose: white desks, glass partitions, linear pendants and an exposed concrete ceiling. Clerestory windows under the lifted roof edge bring in daylight from above, and treetops fill the far windows. The workspace stays neutral so that the architecture around it, and the courtyard within it, can do the work.

The semicircular opening cut into the office wall matters most. Even at a desk you are one glance from the rocks, the tree and the glazed rooms across the garden. Few open-plan offices give every seat a meaningful view of something living, and this one manages it by keeping the building shallow around the courtyard.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings show how simple the strategy is. The first floor plan arranges offices, meeting rooms and the canteen around a lobby and the central courtyard. The roof plan shows two sloping planes on either side of a spine, broken by the circular opening above the garden and a smaller notch at the edge. In sections A-A and B-B, the curved roof sweeps over the rooms and lifts to make room for the courtyard tree.

The eight-step axonometric sequence is the clearest explanation of the project. It starts with the site mass, inserts the central rainwater spine, bends the roofs toward it and then carves out the courtyard. The order matters: water and climate shape the form first, and the program follows. That is the opposite of how most speculative offices on Bangkok's fringe get built.

Why This Project Matters

Corporate wellness architecture often comes down to amenities: a gym, a nap pod, a green wall in the lobby. Studio Krubka's approach is structural rather than decorative. A courtyard runs through the plan, circulation is semi-outdoor, the roof is organized around rainwater and openings are set to frame the landscape. Wellbeing here comes from the arrangement of the building, not from features added on top. For a company whose products come from Thai plants, that alignment between brand and building is credible in a way that signage could never be.

The project also offers a useful model for mid-sized offices in tropical suburbs, where the default is a sealed, air-conditioned box facing a parking lot. Heavy shading outside, an open garden inside and a roof that handles water and light together is a strategy that other studios could adapt at similar budgets and scales. The building is not perfect, and its insistent framing of a single tree may feel staged to some. It still makes a convincing case that an office can respond to its climate and still feel calm.

Novolife Headquarters Office by Studio Krubka (lead architect Danai Surasa), Bang Khae Nuea, Thailand. Area: 890 m². Completed: 2026. Photography by Weerapon Singnoi.

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