Studio Massimo Hides a Timber Office Inside a Living Roof on the Dutch Heath

From the north, you might walk straight past it. A low wall of repurposed tiles, a path framed by a geometric wooden screen, and beyond that — heather, grasses and sky. The building is there, but its overgrown green roof and bark-clad walls dissolve into the surrounding woodland so completely that Studio Massimo, the Amsterdam-based practice behind it, wanted the structure to read not as a constructed object but as a geological mass. Studio Massimo

The project, called Office in Nature, sits on the Tafelberg heath in Blaricum, North Holland — a protected glacial-moraine landscape of subtle slopes, open views and fragile vegetation. Dezeen The 1,120-square-metre building replaces a derelict events hall and occupies one of the highest points on the heath. Archello

Studio Massimo's founder, Max Verhoeven, drew on a regional dwelling type called a plaggenhut — small homes that historical farm labourers built from turf and grass. Dezeen The reference is less about copying a form than about borrowing a logic: use what the ground grows, and let the building settle into its setting rather than announce itself.

The structure is laminated timber — columns and beams made from certified wood sourced in sustainably managed forests. Arquitectura Viva Inside, nearly every surface, from walls and ceilings to cupboards and staircases, is finished in Red Grandis, a pale hardwood. The heart of the plan is a seven-metre-high central space with gabled ceilings lined in timber battens that curve up toward roof lights running the full length of the apex. Daylight pours down the pitch. Dezeen

The southern face opens up. Full-height sliding glass doors project toward the heathland, framing panoramic views across the protected landscape. The south elevation and large gable ends are clad entirely in panels of textured poplar bark, chosen to echo the trunks of the surrounding trees. Dezeen

Two cut-outs carved into the southern slope of the roof create open-air terraces for meeting rooms and workspaces on the first floor. The roof itself is not decorative — it is a living heather landscape planted with roughly a hundred native, organically grown species. Dezeen Where most green roofs sit as a thin sedum carpet, this one is a functioning slice of the heath lifted onto a building.

What makes the project quietly striking is the consistency of the thinking. Every material decision — bark that matches tree trunks, timber certified to sustainably managed standards, a roof planted with the same heather species that grows at its feet — pulls the building toward the landscape rather than setting it apart. Studio Massimo describes itself as a firm dedicated to projects deeply rooted in nature. Studio Massimo Office in Nature takes that description literally.