PECULIAR ISLAND — Architecture, seen through cinema. The beginning of a different way of looking.

Kubu translates to hut in Balinese. Taru to tree. Kubu Taru — Tree Hut. Kubu Taru was built with faith in mind, carrying in its spaces traces of Hindu Cosmology and Sacred Geometry. Sebastian Mesdag started his journey with a decision to build his family home on rice fields, confronting the dangers that come with land conditioned by monoculture. That resistance became a personal project: to let nature back into the area and, in turn, the house itself.

Local trees were reintroduced into the landscape — ficus saplings that would, in time, grow into sublime canopies for the fledgling biological community beneath them. The main thread here is time. Kubu Taru does not seek to contain time, but rather to let it stretch and compress. The Tree Hut itself, perched atop traditional Balinese stilts with “Moorish influences,” became a space for Mesdag and his family to dream. As dreams are, they do not need to be chained to one particular time or influence. Kubu Taru is a manifestation of that. It is of its time, but it does not bend to it. It is an accumulation of both real influences and flights of fancy made into reality.