Munich has some of the steepest commercial rents in Germany, and anyone who has tried to lease even a modest studio space knows the arithmetic rarely works in a small firm’s favor. Brokers, multi-year contracts, square footage priced by the centimeter. When the Munich architecture practice Opposite Office needed a new home base, founder Benedikt Hartl looked at those numbers and decided the smartest move wasn’t a smaller office or a coworking membership. It was no office at all, at least not the kind anyone pays rent on.
The result is Baumhaus Office, a roughly one-square-meter cube strapped to a tree on the campus of Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, built from spruce timber, plywood, and an aluminum shell that Hartl half-jokingly describes as “UFO-like.” A ladder gets you up to it. Inside, there’s shelving, a small desk, and fold-down panels that expand the workspace just enough to fit two or three people if everyone keeps their elbows in. A domed skylight sits overhead, so instead of staring at a drop ceiling, you get a view of the canopy. Two ratchet straps, cushioned with protective matting so the bark doesn’t suffer, hold the whole thing to the trunk. Hartl secured permission from the university’s president to install it there temporarily, and he’s designed it to come down just as easily and go up somewhere else.
Designer: Benedikt Hartl
His explanation for the whole exercise is refreshingly blunt. Rather than compete with Munich’s rental market, he moved the office out of it entirely and into the trees. He’s also put out an open call, only half-kidding, for anyone with a spare tree and a good view who doesn’t intend to charge him for it.
There’s an obvious punchline in a firm shrinking its footprint to one square meter, but the joke has a point buried in it. Opposite Office already works across borders on projects that rarely require a fixed headquarters, so the studio started asking why it needed a permanent lease at all. That question lands differently depending on where you’re reading this, but it lands. Downtown office towers in plenty of American cities have sat half empty for years now, landlords still pricing space as if 2019 never ended, and companies quietly deciding that a conference room and a Zoom link cover most of what used to require a floor plan. Baumhaus Office takes that same skepticism about commercial real estate and pushes it to its logical, slightly absurd conclusion. If the point of an office is a roof, a desk, and a door you can close, a tree does two of those things for free.
Opposite Office has framed the project as a nod to Cosimo, the boy in Italo Calvino’s “The Baron in the Trees” who abandons ground level entirely and never comes back down. I like that reference more than the usual sustainability talking points that get bolted onto projects like this. It’s not really about wood versus concrete. It’s about changing your vantage point on purpose, even briefly, to see whether the thing you assumed you needed was actually optional the whole time.
I’ll admit the practical side of me has questions. Winter in Thuringia is not gentle, and a plywood cube with a skylight is not insulation in any serious sense. But treating this as a permanent HQ misses the point Hartl is making. It’s a provocation with a ladder, built to prove that an architecture studio’s real asset is the people doing the thinking, not the address on the lease. Whether or not Baumhaus Office survives its first real storm, it’s already done its job: it made a very expensive problem look, for a moment, genuinely small.
