Eight ingenious homes for wildlife around the world

Animal-friendly designers are creating bespoke structures for specific creatures. From a bat home in the UK countryside to a multi-species refuge in the Catskills, here are eight cleverly designed wildlife havens.

Wildlife has long made its home in our buildings around the world, whether that's swallows fashioning their nests in the eaves, or geckos getting comfortable in the cracks of an exterior wall. Now animal-friendly designers are creating bespoke architecture for specific creatures. These designers are treating wildlife as their clients, catering for their specific nesting, mating, roosting, hibernating and sheltering needs.

"It's about making sure that, as humans alter and reuse landscapes, we deliberately provide long-term infrastructure for the other species that occupy it as well," says architect Owen Pearce. So rather than designing a building and then retrofitting wildlife accommodation, the requirements of the wildlife help determine the form, height, orientation, openings and construction of the architecture.

But these clients can be unpredictable. "We're creating opportunities for wildlife rather than trying to prescribe exactly how nature should behave," Pearce says of the wildlife tower his firm recently designed. "We've done our best to provide the conditions we think different species need and want, but now we have to observe the tower over time and see what actually happens."

Here are eight structures built specifically for wildlife, with many of them aimed at encouraging multiple species to cohabit.

1. Tower for bats, barn owls, little owls, kestrels, invertebrates and wetland species, Somerset, UK

This multi-species tower is at Honeygar, a former dairy farm on the Somerset Levels, which Somerset Wildlife Trust is gradually rewilding and rewetting. It's designed and built by architecture firm Pearce and is almost entirely made from locally-sourced, reclaimed materials.

"We deliberately thought about the different species as the clients of the building," says Pearce. "Each has very different requirements, so the architecture changes as you move from the wet ground at the bottom of the tower to the nesting and roosting spaces at the top."

The tower's lower level is intended to appeal to slow worms, newts and other small wildlife. It sits within a seasonally wet landscape, and is full of gaps and crevices for them. Higher up, pieces of larch timber have been stacked, again with openings, recesses and perches for insects and small birds. Inside, there are individually designed nesting and roosting spaces for barn owls, kestrels and little owls. Each is catered for with different entrance sizes, ledges, internal box dimensions and positions.

2. Piaule Multispecies Habitats, Catskill, NY, US

These sculptural structures by Joyce Hwang are a bit like tall clothes racks, each standing on a slatted base. But instead of clothes, the wooden frames support a variety of bird nesting boxes, bat houses, and insect habitat boxes, at different heights and of different........

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