Tropical modern home brings the jungle indoors

Benjamin Garcia Saxe knows his way around a tropical house. The architect behind Studio Saxe builds homes layered with balconies, terraces, and walkways that create beautiful moments of indoor-outdoor living.

His new design “Jungle Frame House” in Nosara, Costa Rica, is more of the same, which is to say, an absolutely enviable house that lets nature dictate its form. The three-story home is nestled in the Costa Rican jungle where its lightweight timber-and-steel frame makes it feel like an extension of the landscape.

Photo: Andres Garcia Lachner

Constructed from prefabricated i-beams, the house was built on-site without disturbing the forest. Its frame is encased in glass and wooden louvers that diffuse the sunlight.

The home’s bedrooms sit on the second and third levels where glassy volumes cantilever over the forest floor. The design centers around the main floor, though, where the indoor living room connects with an outdoor patio that sits at ground level and creates a three-story atrium.

Photo: Andres Garcia Lachner

Photo: Andres Garcia Lachner

“We made the very conscious decision of grounding people to the forest floor in the main living area,” the architects explain. “This allowed us to then be able to create a dramatic tall space on top of it, in a way almost counterintuitively bringing the sounding forest much more strongly to the inside of the property.”

Photo: Andres Garcia Lachner