New Zealand Yellow Treehouse Restaurant Serves Lunch

Peter Eising is one of four directors that manage the operations of Pacific Environments, an architectural firm based in Auckland, New Zealand. The full-service firm handles urban, interior, and landscape design as well as master planning and consultancy for project developments. Their projects have focused on Auckland proper, but they’ve also developed structures for clients as far away as Fiji.  One of their most talked-about accomplishments involves a flight of fancy designed by Eising and fellow architect Lucy Gauntlett. The Yellow Treehouse Restaurant is realized by an ad campaign fathered by New Zealand’s Yellow Pages. They approached the firm with the idea of building a real scale-model establishment from raw materials purchased entirely from within the Yellow Pages.  The result is an eighteen-seat restaurant and café measuring 10 meters wide by 12 meters high, a unique structure that lights up the surrounding environment at night from its perch in the middle of a 40 meter-high redwood tree.  The unusual application of “green engineering” has drawn some criticism, however, due to its dubious sponsor, who contributes to an estimated 500 million printed directories in the U.S. each year, defeating the purpose of the client’s organic design initiatives.