Most of us share our homes with nature every day by placing house plants, bird feeders and birdhouses in and around our residences – but these ingenious “Brick Habitats” let us share our walls in a quite literal sense. Brick Habitats are the creation of designer Chooi-leng Tan. She invented these modules to help bring nature back to the places it has been unceremoniously pushed out of: residential neighborhoods. They make it easy to host wildlife in urban areas.

The suite consists of three different types of special bricks. They can be used alone or in combination to add planters, habitats and feeders for the flora and fauna you would like to support.

Bowl-shaped pieces can be used upright or inverted to create habitats, feeders or perches for birds or insects. A bowl-shaped brick with a ring-shaped piece above it can be used as a planter for herbs, vegetables or lovely flowers to make your own customized vertical garden.

Of course, the Brick Habitat bricks would have to be integrated during new construction because they are designed to be part of a wall itself. The designer doesn’t explain what happens if one of the special pieces gets damaged or broken off. But the design is still in the concept stage, allowing time for plenty of refinement before the idea is ready to be brought into the real world.

Sometimes a design is so close to hitting the mark that you can’t help but dream about tweaking it just a tiny bit. What if these modules somehow snapped onto existing bricks instead, so that people could add them onto their upper-floor apartment walls and other spaces that are lacking wildlife? Perhaps they’d have to be a lighter material, something just as beautiful as Tan’s design. But Brick Habitats have a lot of promise, and it’s fun to imagine how you’d design an entire home around their inclusion.