TreeHouse greening the West End skyline

RPS’ Landscape Architecture team has created an award-winning garden oasis for the TreeHouse residential building in Brisbane’s West End.

Incorporating greenery

The need to cater for population growth while maintaining green spaces is an ongoing challenge for inner-city suburbs.

Governments and developers are increasingly looking to landscape architects to offer solutions, and to help ensure high-density residential buildings are sympathetic and add value to the surrounding environment.

With this in mind, Aria Property Group engaged RPS to help design the landscape response for the residential building in Brisbane’s West End called TreeHouse.

Living greenery principles

From the outset, the building had greenery at its core. The RPS Landscape Architecture team was involved from the earliest phases of the building’s design, where – in essence - the building was reverse designed to ensure the position of trees and the tree canopy would shape the structure’s overall footprint.

Meticulous consideration was given to the site’s location to ensure it complemented the West End riverside area and the well-established Davies Park.

Planning of the façade allowed for 60 trees to be planted to achieve TreeHouse’s vision of ‘living within the trees’. And all floors, unit types and sizes – no matter the price point – would have access to a façade tree. This is in line with living greenery principles, where the use of plants goes beyond the functional benefits of shade provision and reduced heat-island effect, to incorporate accessibility - equal access to greenery.

The building’s rooftop was designed to cater for recreation and relaxation with pools, peaceful areas and vegetation to frame the views.

TreeHouse’s design demonstrates how leafy outlooks can be incorporated into high rise building schemes, how active and healthy garden experiences can be created in the city, and how dense built form structures can reflect and enhance the natural character of our inner-city suburbs.

Award-winning project

RPS’ Landscape Architecture team won the 2022 Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA)'s national award for Gardens for TreeHouse.

Aria Property Group won ‘Best high-density development over 10 storeys’ and ‘Design excellence award’ at the 2022 Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA) Queensland awards.