Studio Officina82 Freezes a Sliding Alpine Hay-Barn Roof into a 12 m² Treehouse Cabin in Piedmont

TreeBOX is a single guest room of 12 m², lifted off a wooded slope on four timber posts in Alpisella, a once-abandoned stone hamlet above Garessio near the border between Piedmont and Liguria. Studio Officina82, the Garessio practice led by architect Fabio Revetria and landscape architect Lara Sappa, designed it for Selucente, a hospitality project built around bringing Alpisella back to life. The studio has worked on the hamlet for roughly a decade, and that long engagement shows. This is not a novelty pod dropped onto a scenic plot by someone passing through.

What makes the cabin worth your attention is where its idea comes from. The barchi, the traditional hay barns of the Ligurian-Piedmontese Alps, have roofs that slide up and down four wooden posts depending on how much hay sits underneath. TreeBOX keeps the four posts and the vertical gesture, then removes the mechanism. The faceted, shingled roof reads as a lid caught halfway up its rise. It is a small project, but it shows how a regional building type can generate a contemporary form without nostalgia and without simply copying the old barn.

Four Posts and a Light Touch on the Slope

Most treehouses lean on trees. This one does not. The structure, engineered by Corrado Curti of IngeMBP, puts no load on the surrounding oaks; it stands on a minimal timber frame of four posts set into the sloping forest floor, with cross-bracing that becomes visible once you walk underneath. That decision is the ethical core of the project. The trees decide where the cabin goes, but they carry none of its weight.

The angled legs also give the building its stance. Seen from below, the volume seems to hover over the slope instead of sitting on it, and the ground stays almost untouched: grass, rock and leaf litter continue straight under the floor. On a hillside where any foundation means excavation, four points of contact is about as restrained as you can get while still building a room.

A Barchi Roof Frozen Mid-Rise

The faceted profile carries the concept. A barchi roof is a functional device; its height simply records the size of the harvest. Studio Officina82 takes that readable vertical movement and fixes it in a single position, so the folded planes of roof and underside suggest motion without delivering any. Shot from low angles against a dusk sky, the cabin looks less like a house and more like a shingled object pausing on its way up the posts.

We think the restraint here matters. The roof has no gimmick and no moving parts, which keeps maintenance honest for a remote site. The sister structures at Selucente, StarsBOX with its opening roof and GlamBOX with a bed that rolls onto its deck, take on the kinetic ideas. TreeBOX is the static member of the family, and it is stronger for not trying to perform.

One Skin of Shingles

Timber shingles wrap the roof, the walls and the faceted underside as one continuous surface. There is no change of material where the roof becomes the wall, and no plinth where the wall turns under. The result is a single scaled texture that reads as one object, and among oak trunks it registers more like bark than cladding. Through leaves on an overcast day, the roof nearly disappears into the misty hills behind it.

The palette is limited to wood, glass and steel, and each has a clear role. The shingles weather with the forest, the timber-framed glazing reflects the canopy back at itself, and black steel balusters stay thin enough to let the shingle surface dominate. It is a disciplined material strategy for a building this small, where every extra finish would show.

Arrival by Bridge

Because the cabin sits above a slope, you arrive across it rather than climbing up to it. A timber bridge with steel railings runs from the hillside to a plank door set flush in the shingled wall. The approach works as a threshold: a few steps of walking on air before you are inside, which prepares you for a room that is all about being suspended.

The only signage is the name in corten steel on the wooden door, lit after dark. At night that illuminated doorway is the single marker visible from the path below. It is a quiet gesture that does the work of wayfinding and branding at once, and it respects the darkness of the woods.

A Bed Aimed at the Canopy

Inside, the program is just a room to sleep in, and the plan treats it that way. The bed sits at the glazed front, set against floor-to-ceiling timber-framed windows that look straight into the oak canopy and, beyond it, toward the ridges of the Ligurian-Piedmontese Alps. Plywood lines the sloped walls, and a slatted timber screen gives the bed a backrest and a sense of enclosure.

The interior is plain on purpose. Sage and green linens pick up the foliage outside, and the plywood stays neutral. In 12 m² the view is the main event, and the architects know it. Nothing inside competes with the glass.

Sleeping Under a Net

The small footprint is organized vertically. Above the bed, a rope net stretches across the exposed beams, reached by a short ladder, with a skylight and a small opening window cut into the plywood-lined corner. Guests can lie on the net and look up through the branches, which turns the space above the bed from leftover volume into a second, hammock-like level.

This is the cleverest spatial move in the project. A net weighs almost nothing, lets light pass to the bed below and doubles the usable experience of the room without adding enclosed floor area. A red-topped baluster at the edge adds the only bright color in the interior, and it is enough to mark the change of level.

A Lantern in the Oaks

After sunset the cabin turns inside out. Amber light fills the glazing, the shingled mass goes dark, and from a drone or from the slope below it reads as a lantern hung among the treetops. A small railed terrace with two chairs extends the room outward, giving guests a place to sit at canopy height without a large deck that would bring more structure into the woods.

The night images also reveal the cabin's scale. Against tall conifers and under a pink or orange sky, it is clearly a single room, modest and self-contained. That modesty is the point: one lit window and one lit door, and the rest of the forest is left to the dark.

Plans and Drawings

The masterplan places TreeBOX within the wider Selucente estate, with scattered buildings, tree clusters and winding access roads across the hillside. The plans set out a square cabin on three levels: floor, net mezzanine and roof, reached by a long ramp approach. Sections A-A and B-B show the relationship that drives the whole design, the floor held level while the ground falls away beneath it, with the bridge spanning the gap.

The axonometric drawings, including cutaways of the bed, shelving and net, show the cross-braced legs and the glazed corner with its triangular window aimed at the trees. Small figures and birds among the pines keep the scale honest. These drawings make clear how little of the building actually meets the ground.

Why This Project Matters

Glamping architecture often drifts toward spectacle: mirrored boxes, pods and shapes chosen mainly for the photograph. TreeBOX shows a different route. It draws its form from the barchi, a working building type from its own valley, and turns a functional mechanism into a fixed gesture that guests can read. Its structural choice is ethical as well as technical, keeping all load off the trees that define its site. It also belongs to a decade-long effort by a local studio to bring an abandoned hamlet back into use, which gives it a seriousness that one-off holiday cabins rarely have.

For designers working on small hospitality buildings in sensitive landscapes, the lessons are concrete. Touch the ground at as few points as you can. Use one material skin and let it weather. Organize tight floor areas vertically with lightweight elements like nets instead of solid mezzanines. Root the form in something local enough that it reads as belonging rather than imported. At 12 m², TreeBOX proves that a strong idea does not need much area to carry it.

TreeBOX Cabin by Studio Officina82 (Fabio Revetria, Lara Sappa), structural engineering by Corrado Curti, IngeMBP. Alpisella, Garessio, Italy. 12 m². Completed 2026. Photography by Giulia Sarno.

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