Chilean Studio Builds a Three-Storey Timber Retreat in the Andean Rainforest
A Chilean architecture studio has completed a three-storey house in the Andean foothills, built almost entirely from prefabricated timber and designed to sit inside a temperate rainforest like a vertical slice of the canopy itself.
Iragüen Viñuela Arquitectos, based in Chile, designed the House by Fuy River for a couple from Santiago. The 150-square-metre retreat sits on an 8,000-square-metre site in a forest clearing near the Huilo-Huilo biological reserve in southern Chile, bordering the Fuy River that gives the project its name. Dezeen reported the project on 17 August 2026, with photography by Marcos Zegers and Mauro Pesce (Dezeen).
The building is rectangular in plan and rises three levels, topped with a hipped roof. Rather than spreading the home horizontally across the clearing, the studio stacked it vertically so that each floor engages with what they describe as "different layers of the forest canopy" — the dense upper foliage, the filtered middle and the damp, shaded ground.
The structural frame is mass timber, specifically glue-laminated elements — beams and panels formed by bonding layers of wood with adhesive under pressure, creating components strong enough to carry structural loads. These were cut using a CNC machine, a computer-controlled router, and prefabricated off-site as what the studio called "a kit of large structural components" before being assembled on location. The timber is left exposed throughout the interior, so the laminated grain of every column and beam is visible from inside.
Outside, the walls mix pre-painted metal cladding with glazed curtain walls — full-height glass panels set in a frame, rather than load-bearing walls — chosen as low-maintenance materials suited to the wet forest climate.
The House by Fuy River is not the studio's first prefabricated timber project. Earlier in 2026, Dezeen reported on Casa SI, a square-shaped prefabricated timber house the studio designed on the rural outskirts of Algarrobo, a seaside town south of Santiago (Dezeen). Before that, the practice completed a house on the Cautín River in Malalcahuello, Chile, in 2020, as documented by ArchDaily (ArchDaily).
What ties these projects together is a consistent method: cut the parts in a workshop, ship them to a remote site, and assemble quickly with minimal disruption to the surrounding landscape. For a house on the edge of a biological reserve, where heavy machinery and long construction timelines carry an environmental cost, that approach matters as much as the architecture itself.
