For us, this house didn't begin with a plan, but with a family. When we set out to design a home on a pine-forested plot of over 11,000 square metres on the shore of Lohusalu Bay for an Estonian family, our starting point wasn't a fixed geometry, but the spirit of the place and the essence of the family itself — how they wanted to be together and alone, how light should enter their days, and how the forest should remain part of their lives, not disappear from them.
That led to one of our most important decisions: the building's footprint is just 350 square metres, or 3.1% of the entire plot — the maximum allowed under the detailed spatial plan. We didn't want the house to take space from the forest. We wanted it to fit itself into the forest — exactly as much as needed, and no more.
What emerged is a sculptural, freely branching form: a sequence of soft decisions, where the position of each volume beneath the trees answers to something specific — a view, a need for privacy, or the path of the sun. We didn't want the building to press itself onto the forest. Instead, we let it move between the trees, curving around a U-shaped inner courtyard that stays shielded from neighbours' eyes yet remains full of sunlight. For us, that inner bend is the heart of the house — the place where family life actually happens, and where, come summer, sliding the glass walls open dissolves the boundary between room and terrace entirely.
On the ground floor, we split the house in two: one wing gathers the quieter side of life — a 25-square-metre entrance hall, a wardrobe, an 18-square-metre library, and the main bedroom — while the other becomes a shared, living space with the kitchen, living room, and a full sauna world: a steam room, a sauna, a shower room, and a 20-square-metre lounge with its own entrance from outside. On the upper floor, we left the family a more private layer: three bedrooms of varying sizes, a training room, and a reading nook looking straight into the pines. We listened to the landscape itself, too — because the ground slopes toward the sea, we set the sauna volume a level below the rest of the house, so the connection between the courtyard terrace and the ground would stay seamless. Beneath the foundation, we fit in a technical floor of nearly 92 square metres with a small wine cellar — everything that supports the family's daily life while staying invisible itself.
The house stands just 100 metres from Lohusalu Bay, close enough that the sea is always sensed even when it isn't seen. But the site's real character comes from what stands between the house and the water: a dense, tall pine forest, luminous and crisp, its floor a soft, undulating terrain. We didn't want to clear that forest to make room for a house. We wanted the house to slip through it. Villa Lohusalu doesn't sit on the land so much as it winds through it — each volume curling around the trunks it meets, bending where a pine demands it, narrowing where the canopy closes in, opening where it parts. The building reads less like an object placed in the forest and more like something that grew around what was already there, negotiating its shape tree by tree. That closeness to the sea remains present throughout the house without ever dominating it. Glimpses of water appear between the pines from certain rooms, at certain hours, never as a fixed, framed view but as something glimpsed — the same way you'd catch it walking through the woods yourself. The forest stays the primary companion; the sea is its quiet backdrop.
Interior architecture has never been a separate layer for us — it's an extension of the house's core idea. The same flowing line that carries the façade around the tree trunks continues, in our hands, indoors too: walls, tables, and furniture curve the same way the house itself does.
We merged the kitchen and dining area into one generous, 68-square-metre room, anchored by a curved island — smooth white on one side, veined marble on the other. That contrast carries both softness and gravity through the space. Above the dining table, we chose amber and glass-globe pendant lights that hang like suspended drops of water, giving mealtimes an almost dreamlike mood.
Into the living room went a large, curved, soft sofa that follows exactly the same line traced by the courtyard's glass façade. For us, furniture should never sit in a room by accident — it has to be drawn by the same hand that designed the house itself. The materials continue that same honesty: oiled wood floors, airy steel-and-timber staircases, soft leather chairs around the dining table.
The most distinctive decision landed in the library, whose wall we designed from rammed earth — quite literally, soil excavated from the site itself during construction. That gave us a wall texture that can't be copied or repeated anywhere else — it carries, in a very literal sense, the place where the house stands.
Photos: Tõnu Tunnel