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.

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.

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 styles and sizes. Designed as simple A frames, each armature has a "bent" leg, as if it's about to be on the move. Hwang partnered with students from Pratt Institute's Architecture School on this project, and a series of the habitats stands alongside a walking trail in Catskill, at the foot of the Catskill Mountains.

The Vlotwatering, a small canal in the Westland, in the south-west region of The Netherlands, is part of a newly created green recreational route. The canal is also an important flight corridor for several bat species, and NEXT Architects' new 25m (82ft)-long bridge for pedestrians and cyclists was seen as a good opportunity to introduce roosting habitats for them.

The bridge is constructed of concrete, with its ability to absorb and release heat providing a stable and comfortable microclimate for a variety of bat roosts. Then three specific bridge sections contain habitats for bats in different seasons. The northern bridgehead acts as a winter shelter, where the temperature is low and stable. There are summer residences on the underside of the bridge deck and the masonry balustrade, which double as maternity and mating quarters. Meanwhile the bats' main entrance is on the waterside, signposted for them by a concrete ledge. The hope is that a large colony will grow around the bridge.

The decline in insect numbers over recent decades has spurred designer Marlène Huissoud's creation: Please Stand By. She was driven by the desire to give something back to bugs, particularly those who are city dwellers such as ants and centipedes. In Please Stand By, they can take refuge, nest and hibernate. With the help of Robert Francis and Mak Brandon from King's College London, the studio picked insects' preferred materials, and the colours that they are attracted to in the natural world, such as white, grey and dark tones.

Huissoud used natural clay (not fired to keep it as primitive as possible) to create a series of bulbous, organic forms, and then coated them in a natural binder to protect them from the weather.

When a traditional barn owl site, such as an old building or hollow tree, disappears, the Barn Owl Trust has a solution: a small structure – just 2 sq m (6.6 sq ft), and 4.5m (15ft) tall – with three of its walls offering different opportunities. The east-facing wall has an entrance hole 3.5m (11ft) above ground level that leads into a generous, deep nestbox.

To maximise chances of occupation, the hole overlooks open ground, so that a passing owl might spot it. On the west-facing wall, there's a shallow, open-fronted nest cavity to appeal to kestrels. Below that is a small hole leading to a deep nestbox for little owls. The perches just below each owl hole, and the big roof overhead mean it's safer for vulnerable fledglings when they emerge. The warmer south-facing wall has lots of smaller holes in the mortar for spiders, wasps and other bugs.

The village of Mumbles on Swansea Bay is protected from flooding by a 1.2km (0.7 mile) seawall, which is also as a home for marine species such as seaweed, limpets and barnacles. This is because sections of the wall, designed with experts at Swansea University, include hexagonal concrete panels. Each panel has deep ridges and patterns that mimic the rough contours of a rocky coast, and the sea creatures have taken up residence in these gaps and crevices.

This is a piece of key infrastructure masquerading as a home for solitary bees, invertebrates, spiders, beetles and birds. Inside, mechanical and electrical systems prevent sewage pollution from flowing into the River Thames. But outside, the wall acts as a vertical habitat. Part of the 100-sq-m (328-sq-ft) facade comprises a gabion wall – wire mesh cages stuffed with natural and waste materials. Unlike traditional green walls, this type of wall doesn't need any irrigation, has superior fire performance, and could host wildlife for between 50 and 120 years. What's more, the brown roof acts as an ecological corridor for creatures travelling to and from nearby green spaces such as the London Wetland Centre in south-west London.

While infrastructure for wildlife aims to promote their good health, not every example has been built with their longevity in mind. This 18th-Century deer house is in the former deer park of Auckland Castle, a residence of the Bishops of Durham since the Norman period. For centuries, deer were hunted here by the aristocracy and nobility.

Deer were fed in the courtyard and sheltered in the arcade, which had a roof of slate tiles at the time. It doubled as a rest stop for the bishop's hunting guests, who could picnic and take in the views from its human-friendly rooms. It's a rare example of 18th-Century Gothic Revival architecture, a fanciful interpretation of medieval buildings, hence its mock-castle aesthetic, complete with battlements, arrow loops, pinnacles and pointed arches.

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