In South Africa, in the mountains of the Waterberg Nature Reserve, the House of the Big Arch designed by the architectural firm Frankie Pappas was built.

The house was built for an elderly couple who wanted a place to live completely surrounded by nature. The architects, however, didn’t just think of a dwelling in the landscape, they also thought of a way to camouflage the building with its surroundings and did it so well that the house is difficult to see from the ground or from above.

Given the structure of the land and the dense forest, the main objective was to build a house that would not affect nature and was achieved by designing it with a long and narrow plan.

The House of the Big Arch, in fact, is only 3.3 meters wide and literally slips into the trees. To the central structure, then, have been added rooms and side areas, also designed to fit perfectly between nature. This choice made it possible to build the house without cutting down even one tree.

As far as the materials are concerned, the most abundant one is certainly the raw brick that takes up the color of the sandstone rock of the mountains, alternating with wood and integrated with glass and aluminum for the structural parts.

Inside, the house is divided into two levels, the ground floor houses courtyards, study, library, while the upper one includes a living room, dining room, kitchen and bedrooms. In addition, the house also has a lower level used as a cellar.

As the name says, La House of the Big Arch is a bridge between the forest and the rock and shows how architecture and landscape are one.