A dog-friendly F&B space and community club on the rainforest fringe of Kuching, Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia.
Status: Completed (July 2023-February 2026)
At the fringe of Kuching, where the city’s edge meets the rainforests of Borneo, we were asked to design a green building. Our response was a question: why build another concrete jungle when a real one is already here? Our answer was to invert the greenhouse.
In Malaysia, religious sensitivities mean dogs are disallowed in most public spaces, including roadsides, public parks and nature reserves. Many local dogs spend their lives within residential premises, and many have never experienced nature. Places for dogs and their people to meet and socialise outside the home are just as scarce. Fable fills that gap. It sits alongside BarkPark Borneo, a private dog park and boarding facility, and the rescue facilities of the Humane Animal Society Sarawak. It gives the community a welcoming, climate-controlled space where dogs and people can flourish together.
Our design began with the greenhouse, a building type that has long fascinated us. Greenhouses temper the climate outside, harness natural light and create ideal conditions for life within. The comfortable temperature range for a person is much the same as that for a plant. In a temperate climate, glass shelters plants from the cold. In the tropics, we reversed the relationship: here the plants shelter the glass. People and dogs sit inside a cool steel-and-glass volume, while the greenery lives on the outside, taking over the structure the way jungle plants reclaim anything left standing in the rainforest.
The building takes the form of a minimalist steel-and-glass frame with an integral trellis. Its clean lines and open glass walls draw on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the modernist architect known for simple glass pavilions that blur the line between inside and outside. Here, that clarity becomes a frame for nature. Cissus nodosa and native climbers grow up the facade and spill over the soffit, weaving a living skin around the frame. The result is dappled shade and green views on every side. Sitting inside Fable feels much like standing beneath the canopy of the nearby rainforest.
Inside, at the heart of the space, hangs a plant chandelier, a cascade of greenery held in expanded steel mesh and woven with light. It casts dappled leaf shadows across the floor.
As night falls, the inverted greenhouse inverts itself once more. Light from within glows out through the layers of foliage, and the building becomes a verdant lantern, casting the intricate silhouettes of leaves into the surrounding darkness.
Day and night, Fable shows that nature and architecture are not mutually exclusive. It is a framework where plants, dogs and people thrive together.
Images by Archigardener
