Perched above a stand of oak trees on a private countryside estate in Garessio, TreeBOX borrows its rising logic from the barchi, the traditional hay barns of the Italian Ligurian Alps, whose roofs slide vertically along four wooden posts to match the volume of hay stored beneath them. Designed by Officina82, the Garessio-based practice founded by architect Fabio Revetria and landscape architect Lara Sappa, the cabin sits within Selucente, a countryside residence in the Cuneo province. What began as a piece of farm equipment becomes, in this reading, a mechanism for lifting a guest room into a canopy.
A vernacular gesture endures, though only in form. The barchi were never static: their movable roofs rose and fell with the seasons, an agricultural solution to a practical problem of storage and protection. Officina82 keeps that vertical gesture without the mechanism — TreeBOX’s roof doesn’t slide, but its faceted shape freezes that upward motion mid-gesture, a static homage rather than a functional one.
The oak canopy anchors the cabin’s placement more than any site plan could. Set on a slope among the estate’s trees, TreeBOX is raised on a cluster of slender wooden posts, cross-braced against the grade, so that the structure clears the undergrowth entirely and meets the tree line at eye level rather than looking up at it from the ground — a lifted logic not unlike Casetta Tessino in Switzerland, another cabin that trades ground contact for canopy proximity. Wood shingle cladding wraps the exterior in turn, running continuously from the hipped roof down over a faceted, tapering underside before the walls open into full-height glazing at the upper level — catching light differently depending on the hour, from a warm gold at sunset to a near-black silhouette against dusk.
Twelve square meters hold the entire footprint — 129 square feet — a compact figure that belies the double-height loftrising above it: the cabin reaches 4.05 meters (13.3 ft) at its tallest interior point, with a sleeping platform tucked into that vertical space rather than spread across a larger plan.
Inside, a plywood interior lines walls, ceilings, and stair, unfinished and left to show its own grain and knots rather than being papered over — the TreeBOX name carved directly into the timber cladding near the entrance and again on an interior partition. Above the sleeping level, a rope net mezzanine stretches beneath a square skylight, reached by a narrow stair built into a slatted wood screen, creating a loft that reads as neither fully room nor furniture — a suspended plane for lying down and looking straight up through the glass at the branches overhead.
Panoramic glazing frames the bedroom itself, where a run of full-height windows on two sides opens the space onto the valley and the wooded slopes beyond; a king-size bed dressed in sage-green linen sits low against a slatted headboard, positioned so that waking up means facing the tree line directly rather than a wall. A balcony extends from the glazed volume, furnished with a small bistro table and two folding chairs, its sightline dropping past the supporting posts to the forested hillside and, further out, the ridgelines of the Ligurian Alps — the same landscape that produced the barchi this cabin quietly reinterprets.
Officina82 frames the project in continuity with its broader practice. “With the TreeBOX project, Studio Officina82 continues its exploration of how design can bring value to marginal territories, reinterpreting in a contemporary key the rural building traditions that have shaped these landscapes for centuries,” Fabio Revetria and Lara Sappa tell urdesign.
A single lit doorway is, at night, the only visible marker from the path below, the carved TreeBOX lettering glowing above the threshold while the rest of the shingled volume disappears into the trees around it — the cabin at its most legible not in daylight, but in the dark.
TreeBOX by Officina82 | Location: Selucente, Garessio (CN), Italy — Year: 2026 — Key materials: timber frame, wood shingles, plywood — Architectural design: Fabio Revetria, Lara Sappa — Collaborators: Lucrezia Nari, Alessia Catalano, Arianna Sella-Camilla, Francesca Ciudino, Beatrice Uva — Structural design: IngeMBP, Corrado Curti — Client: Selucente