Tag Archives: garden pavilion

This Tiny Beijing Flower Shop Looks Like a Giant Mushroom Sprouting From the Woods

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If you have been reading Yanko Design for a while, you might remember the LUO studio project where they turned an abandoned bike share bicycle into a ladybug shaped mobile library. That is basically this studio’s whole personality in one sentence, take something humble, add almost no material, and make it do way more than it should. Their newest project scales that same instinct up into an actual building. West Garden Florist is a small flower shop and coffee counter in Beijing’s Haidian Park, and it looks like a giant mushroom sprouted out of the woods, all curved timber and a grassy green cap. It is also a pretty direct descendant of a couple of LUO studio’s earlier, smaller experiments in bent wood and minimal material use.

Architect Luo Yujie founded LUO studio in 2017 around the idea that you can build serious architecture with barely any material if you are clever about how you bend it. West Garden Florist, an 84 square meter pavilion completed in 2025, takes that same thin timber logic the studio tested on a rural library and a flower display shelf and blows it up into a full building with a planted roof and a wraparound veranda. The project recently won a Green Good Design Award from The Chicago Athenaeum. It is a small building, but it reads like the studio finally got to build the thesis statement they had been sketching out in smaller projects for years.

Designer: Luo Yujie, with Wang Beilei and Hong Lun of LUO studio

The site sits where three park pathways meet, right next to the lawn that has become the busiest patch of green space in the district, packed with kite flyers, picnickers, and the occasional soccer game. Instead of drawing a floor plan and asking the trees to deal with it, LUO studio flipped the process. The team mapped every trunk already standing in the grove and let the gaps between them dictate the building’s outline, which is why the footprint reads as an irregular blob instead of a tidy rectangle. That decision alone tells you a lot about where this studio’s priorities sit.

The structure itself is the real party trick. Thin timber slats, all cut to standard dimensions, get gathered into bundles that flare outward to form a ring of columns, then fold inward and interweave to build the curved canopy overhead. The gaps between the slats let light, shadow, and glimpses of the surrounding woodland filter straight through the walls, so the building never fully blocks the grove behind it. Circular skylights punched into the roof scatter changing patterns of sun across the floor all day, doing a passable impression of light falling through actual leaves.

Because this is a public park and not a construction site with unlimited access, LUO studio also had to think small on the build side. No heavy machinery could get near the site without tearing up the paths, so every component was sized for a crew to carry and assemble by hand. The foundation follows the same logic. Ground screws replace poured concrete, which spares the soil and means the whole pavilion could theoretically be unscrewed and moved somewhere else if the park ever needed the spot back.

West Garden Florist is not trying to out flex the rest of Haidian Park, which has spent recent years leaning hard into smart benches and AI branded amenities. It just sits quietly under the canopy doing its own thing, selling flowers and coffee to people who wandered off the lawn. Sometimes the most interesting building in the room is the one that skipped the upgrade entirely.

The post This Tiny Beijing Flower Shop Looks Like a Giant Mushroom Sprouting From the Woods first appeared on Yanko Design.

Michael Jantzen’s Garden Retreat Has 30 Panels to Rearrange by Hand

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Most garden structures ask one thing of you: sit still and enjoy the shade. A pergola is a pergola, a gazebo is a gazebo, and neither one particularly cares what the afternoon light is doing. Michael Jantzen’s Interactive Garden Pavilion operates on a different premise entirely, one where the occupant has as much say over the structure as the designer did.

Built from sustainably grown stained wood and painted a uniform forest green, the pavilion sits on an octagonal support frame fitted with 30 slatted hinged panels across its walls and roof. Each panel pivots independently, sliding and rotating along the frame before locking into position. Open them wide on a hot afternoon, and the interior breathes. Angle them down against the glare, and the space dims considerably.

Designer: Jantzen

That last point is where the design earns its name. Most adjustable outdoor structures offer a single variable, usually an awning or a retractable canopy, within an otherwise fixed form. Here, the entire skin of the building is the variable. The wall panels, roof panels, and ground-level platform extensions can all be repositioned, which means the pavilion can look substantially different from one afternoon to the next.

Pull the panels shut on three sides, and the structure becomes a genuinely private enclosure. Splay them open, and the interior connects fully to the garden around it. In one arrangement, it reads as a dense closed form. In another, the structure opens up entirely, and the slatted framework becomes almost sculptural against the lawn.

Inside, two benches with adjustable backrests run the length of the interior, facing each other. The seating is built into the frame, which keeps the floor plan clean and leaves room to recline fully. When the overhead panels are partially open, sunlight enters in sharp parallel bands that shift across the benches as the day moves, a quality that is either meditative or distracting depending on what you came in for.

The construction logic is also notably practical. The pavilion is a prefabricated modular system, so the components can be scaled before assembly or joined with additional units to form a larger cluster. No foundation is required in most configurations. Given its size and type, a building permit is unlikely to be needed in many jurisdictions, which removes one of the more tedious barriers between an interesting design and an actual garden.

Jantzen has spent decades proposing architecture that responds dynamically to its occupants, much of it remaining on paper. This pavilion is one of the cases where the idea got built, and the result holds up at close range. The slatted wood is honest about what it is, the green paint ties the structure to the garden without trying to disappear into it, and the hinge mechanism does exactly what it promises.

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This Little Cabin In Prague Features A Facade That Can Be Lifted Up To Open It To The Outside

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Dubbed the Garden Pavilion, and designed by BYRÓ architekti, this cozy retreat looks like a simple little shed when you first look at it. However, located on a garden plot in Prague, the home is equipped with a clever space-saving layout. The retreat’s front-facing facade can be raised, opening up the cabin to the outdoors! How cool is that?!

Designer: BYRÓ architekti

The pavilion was constructed on the foundation of what was once an old wooden cottage. Greenhouses and other small cottages are located next to it, which function as storage spaces for gardeners. The retreat was designed to merge with its surroundings while allowing the residents to immerse themselves in nature and enjoy the greenery.

“We thought about how to connect the building as closely as possible to the surrounding garden, and we ultimately came up with the idea of a folding panel that allows one side of the house to completely open,” said BYRÓ architekti. “This way, the interior seamlessly transitions to the outdoors, with the garden penetrating the building, creating a kind of paraphrase of a garden loggia, which was our fundamental architectural inspiration. When open, the polycarbonate wall also functions as an outdoor roof, expanding the covered space where one can stay during rainy weather. The panel folding mechanism consists of steel cables, pulleys, and counterweights, making it easy for one person to open the entire facade.”

The retreat occupies a minimal footprint and measures 3 x 5 m. It has a finish of charred wood which was created using the traditional Japanese technique of Shou Sugi Ban. This technique involves burning wood to preserve the home and keep bugs at bay. The interior of the home is 20 sq m, and it features two floors which have been designed like a tiny home. The ground floor includes an open living area which has plenty of shelving for books and CDs. It also contains a dining table and seating.

The upper floor can be accessed via a fixed wooden ladder and this section doesn’t have to have a lot of headspace. This floor includes the bedroom – some shelving, a double bed, and a skylight. The retreat doesn’t contain a bathroom, which is quite inconvenient, but also implies that it may not be intended for long stays. The Garden Pavilion is better suited for spending time during the day, or for an occasional overnight trip.

The post This Little Cabin In Prague Features A Facade That Can Be Lifted Up To Open It To The Outside first appeared on Yanko Design.