an ornithologist's dream: this home is entirely engineered around bird watching

australia-based studio blight blight & blight challenges traditional home configurations with a house shaped around its owners’ passion: bird watching. located in ivanhoe, australia, the birdhouse sits next to a nature reserve, existing as an extension of it by eliminating all fences and allowing intense vegetation to grow around it. its every part is strategically designed to maximize opportunities for bird watching and photography, rearranging the form of windows and furnishings in order to stage the presence of birds in and around the house.

precedent photo credits to alan murphy photography

blight blight & blight has carefully designed the birdhouse to optimize the conditions of taking a good photograph – the backdrop, the stage, the camera, the camouflage. ‘in a photograph of a bird, the animal itself commands our attention, but in reality the photo relies on a whole bunch of invisible equipment,’ the studio explains while comparing the bird to details of our lives that take center-stage, such as the content an electronic device displays versus the actual object. the building’s façade is clad in logs of trees that fell to clear the site, which is both sustainable and visually ties the house back to the nature reserve. in addition, it’s a way to attract more birds to perch on the outside of the house since the type of insects that formerly inhabited these trees will be attracted to them again.

designboom has received this project from our ‘DIY submissions‘ feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.

edited by: sofia lekka angelopoulou | designboom