Written by Tahananmo Editorial Team
Design by Architect Evgeny Koblov
There is a question every architect faces when they encounter a significant piece of land.
Do you impose the design on the site, or do you let the site impose itself on the design?
Most architecture answers this question by imposing. The land is cleared, leveled, prepared. The building arrives and the landscape arranges itself around it. This is the default mode of residential construction, and it produces most of the houses in the world.
And then there are projects like this one. Forest House, designed by architect Evgeny Koblov, in which the site does not accommodate the architecture. The architecture accommodates the site. The boulder that sits at the heart of the composition was not moved, not integrated, not repurposed as a decorative element. It was left exactly as it was found, and the entire building was designed around the fact of its presence.
This is a fundamentally different approach to design. And the result is a fundamentally different quality of building.
The building is organized as two distinct volumes in clear conversation with each other and with the forest that surrounds them.
The lower volume is grounded: horizontal timber cladding in warm natural tones, anchored close to the earth, quiet and retreating. It reads as part of the landscape rather than an assertion above it. The single-car garage door in the same timber register as the wall beside it. The entry composed with the restraint of someone who understood that the entrance to this house should feel like discovering something rather than arriving somewhere.
The upper volume is the architectural statement: a crisp white rectangular mass that cantilevers dramatically over the lower level and over the boulder beneath it. The cantilever is generous, extending well beyond the support below, creating the specific visual tension that gives the building its character. From the approach, the white volume appears to float. It does not touch the rock. It hovers above it, an architectural acknowledgment of the geology below rather than a competition with it.
Full-height glazing wraps the upper level on at least two visible facades. The pine canopy of the surrounding forest is reflected continuously across the glass surface, the building and the landscape completing each other’s image. From inside, the upper level would dissolve entirely into the treeline. The glass does not frame the forest. It makes the forest the room.
The boulder.
It is an unusual granite formation, catching the light from the overhang above it in a way that gives it a luminous, almost ceremonial quality. The architect has treated it as an object worth lighting, worth framing, worth organizing the entire building around. This is a significant and unusual position to take.
In conventional residential architecture, a boulder of this size in the middle of a building footprint is a problem to be solved. It is excavated, buried, relocated, or disguised. The design begins after it has been dealt with.
Here, the boulder is not dealt with. It is honored. The cantilever of the upper volume creates space for it. The timber cladding of the lower level retreats around it. The lighting beneath the overhang gives it presence after dark. The boulder has not been incorporated into the architecture. It has been given the space that something ancient and irreplaceable deserves.
This one decision is responsible for everything that makes this building memorable. Without it, the building is a competently designed contemporary house. With it, the building becomes a collaboration between a human designer and a geological formation that predates human presence on this site by millions of years.
The Forest House is not a Filipino building. It sits in a pine forest that is clearly not tropical, designed by a Russian architect working in a temperate climate context very different from our own.
And yet the design intelligence it demonstrates is exactly the intelligence that the best contemporary Filipino residential architecture is pursuing right now.
Filipino architects are increasingly designing homes that treat the site as a collaborator rather than a canvas. A BluPrint-featured house nestled in a forested subdivision in Antipolo features a glass-clad double-height living room overlooking the narra and mahogany trees that surround the home, with cantilevered second-floor bedrooms that create shelter for the dining area and lanai while the tree canopy brings fresh air to the upper level. This is the same design impulse as Forest House, expressed in a completely different climate and cultural context.
Add Architecture’s Strata House, shortlisted at the 2026 World Architecture Festival, draws inspiration from the layered rock formations of its cliffside site overlooking the West Philippine Sea, building into the site’s natural slope to minimize visual impact while maximizing connection to the geology and landscape. The conversation between architecture and geological formation that defines Forest House is the same conversation Add Architecture is pursuing on the Philippine coast.
The principle is universal even when the expression is specific: the most powerful residential architecture begins by understanding what the site already is before deciding what the building should add.
The dramatic cantilever of Forest House’s upper volume is not merely a formal gesture. In a tropical Philippine context, the cantilever does climate work as well as compositional work.
In the Forest House, the cantilever shelters the boulder and the entry. In a Filipino house, the same move shelters the lanai, the outdoor dining area, the covered terrace where the family actually lives during most of the day. The formal ambition and the climate intelligence arrive at the same architectural solution through different paths
Before you commission any design, walk your lot and catalog what is already there: the mature trees, the rock outcroppings, the views, the prevailing breezes, the ground level changes. These are not obstacles to be managed. They are the specific conditions that make your lot yours and your house different from every house built on a generic site with nothing to respond to.
An architect who begins by asking what is already on your lot, and what the design should do to honor it, is thinking the way Evgeny Koblov thought when he found that boulder. An architect who begins by imposing a preferred scheme onto the site is working in a different and less interesting mode.
Forest House demonstrates the cantilever at its most dramatic. In a Filipino residential context, the same move is available at more modest scales: a second floor that extends beyond the ground floor to create covered outdoor space below, a roof that cantilevers beyond the wall to shade the glass from afternoon sun, a bedroom that projects outward to create an outdoor sleeping veranda above a garden.
Each of these is a cantilever. Each does climate work, shelter work, and compositional work simultaneously. It is one of the most efficient architectural moves available to a Filipino
homeowner. But do keep in mind that cantilever isn’t economical especially for a simple residential house due to the length of the bars that will be needed for the structural.
Forest House works with three materials. The restraint is not a budget decision. It is a design decision: the commitment to letting each material speak clearly rather than competing for attention against five others.
In a Filipino home, the equivalent restraint might mean: narra for the floors, white render for the walls, and rattan for the lighting. Three materials, each chosen for what it contributes to the character of the space, each allowed to do its work without competition. The homes that feel most considered and most calm are almost always the ones where the material palette was limited with intention.
Design by Evgeny Koblov (@evgeny_koblov). All images and design credits belong to the original architect. Tahananmo features this project for editorial and design education purposes.
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