Branch out: treehouse living

Actress Jennifer Anniston reportedly spent $2 million on one for her husband-to-be Justin Theroux that includes a den with a state-of-the art audio system. The star attraction at Birr Castle’s newly opened playground is a €200,000 Disneyesque turreted playhouse set among trees.

So what's the appeal of tree house living? In his 1994 publication, The Art and Craft of Living out on a Limb, Peter Nelson, an expert tree house builder and author of several books on the subject says: "Tree houses lift the spirits. They inspire dreams. They represent freedom: from adults or adulthood, from duties and responsibilities, from an earthbound perspective. If we can't fly with the birds, at least we can nest with them."

A tree house offers seclusion, a chance to commune with nature but most of all adventure, says Andy Payne, managing director of Blue Forest, the UK-based design company behind the fairy-tale confection at Birr Castle. His clients include Madonna and Eric Clapton. "Inside every adult is a big kid. A tree house lets you time travel back to your childhood."

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Blue Cone Tree Hotel in Sweden, treehotel.se. Photograph: Taschen, from Tree Houses: Fairy Tale Castles in the Air

Blueforest prices are not for the faint-hearted. The “timber-frame houses in the sky” range in price from about €35,000 to €1.175 million, according to Payne. “The way the construction is supported, the engineering behind it is important. They’re insulated and designed for the occasional sleepover.”

Payne grew up in East Africa and spent his childhood enjoying the beauty and adventure of the great outdoors. The father-of-three’s own treehouse, Bensfield Tree House, started life as a home office. Accessed by a 24-metre rope bridge over a pond and built around a mature oak, the property is now available to rent short-term.

The oak fulcrum is the house’s only rustic touch. The centrally-heated space has a chalet-style pitched wood-panelled ceiling and polished floorboards. It is offers an adult-only escape, that couples can rent. No kids are allowed.

His children, Emily (9), Joseph (6), and Molly (3), are still waiting for a tree house of their own.

Most Blueforest clients want something that is out of this world. One commissioned a high-tech hideaway, with everything from biometric fingerprint recognition door locks to night vision CCTV with a multi screen control panel hidden behind a sliding wall. “It also featured an audio-visual media centre with all the latest games consoles, cool plasma plates, a toilet and just about anything the recipient, a nine-year-old, could possibly want in a tree house,” Payne says.

Tech company Mindy Candy, the people behind Moshi Monsters commissioned him to create a treehouse in their head offices in Shoreditch in London.

Castles in the air
So how feasible is it for an Irish person to commission a castle in the air? Colm Doyle of Cabinteely-based Doyle Landscapes has built about a dozen such tree houses for Irish clients. An advocate of the Swiss Family Robinson approach he builds his structures within a group of trees so that they don't "hurt" the tree.

One costing €25,000 includes a cedar shingled roof structure with proper wood floors, insulation, glazing, electricity and running water. But it doesn’t have to be that fancy. His prices start from €1,500. He constructed a design in his Wexford cottage that is set on a platform so that his kids can jump off it and into a sand pit.

Peter O'Brien of Plan Eden in Kilpedder is a carpenter turned landscaper who used the whacky lines of Dr Seuss as inspiration for his magical creation in Mullingar. Suspended between two ancient oaks the grey painted finish construction has a six-foot yellow door and asymmetrical glass windows. Inside the slated roof house there are benches for storing sleeping bags but there wasn't a lot of fitting out, says O'Brien, who likens it to a film set exterior.

The build used found timbers from the grounds and specially-designed metal brackets so that the house could “move” within the swaying trees. A crow’s nest perches above the house with a trap door leading up to that level. A branch that sweeps down to the ground was used to create a rope-bridge up with ship ropes forming its latticed sides. It cost €25,000.

Whatever you decide to build, you have to ensure that any structure conforms to building regulations. “A habitable tree house is by its very nature a separate structure,” says Paul O’Neill , associate planner with GVA Planning and Regeneration.

While he can't advise without seeing specific proposals, he does counsel caution. "While innovative examples of design, they are not currently covered under existing regulations and, in all likelihood, will require planning permission. We would advise people interested in constructing a tree house to seek professional advice."

NESTING INSTINCT

Forget glamping. Twigitecture, the building of human nests is the latest in arboreal architecture and it's a growing international designer trend.

“It all comes back to nesting,” says treehouse fan, furniture designer, Jonathan Legge of online design and craft retail site, Makersandbrothers.com. One of the designers he stocks is James Carroll, aka Stickman, a Wicklow woodsman whose rustic creations are inspired by the time he spends in the canopy of the Wicklow forests.

In the California resort of Big Sur, Treebones’ latest attraction is an overnight in their nest for $110 a night.

Further reading
For design inspiration, Tree Houses: Fairy Tale Castles in the Air by Philip Jodidio, and published by Taschen, is a gorgeous glossy coffee table tome offering mood altering, elevated ideas, including the Lake Nest Tree House, in New York, essentially a human scale bird's nest.

The Treehouse Book, published by Random House, is a collaboration between master treehouse builders Peter and Judy Nelson and David Larkin, who embarked on a treehouse discovery expedition across America.

Peter Nelson’s 2009 book New Treehouses of the World explores the new frontier of arboreal architecture, while his 1994 book Treehouses, The Art and craft of Living out on a Limb offers a brief history of treehouses, from Caligula through to the Medici family to Queen Victoria. It also shows how to design and build a treehouse, from picking the right tree to shingling the roof.

Some titles may be out of print but are available on

Amazon.com

Treehouse designers and builders
Doyle Landscapes (01-2048020, doylescapes.ie)
Plan Eden (01-281 9470, planeden.ie)
Blueforest (0044-1892750090, blueforest.com)