Houses, Tree Houses and Trees: A Bloggy Triptych

Part II of a three part series on homes, trees and tree homes. This is the central and largest panel! Tree houses rock.

Oh! To Live in the Trees!

It's all because of my mom...My love of tree houses that is. Maybe the love and fascination would have come on its own-- it probably would have. However, my visions of a Swiss Family Robinson style pad, with swinging hallways and multiple rooms would probably have been replaced with something less luxurious and more along the lines of a "Girls Rule and Boys Drool, let's build a trapdoor and a pulley system to bring up cookies" kind of fantasy tree house.

We did have a tree house up near our family's lake house that my uncle built back in the day. It was great...a simple, single level with a ladder going up to it. It overlooked the small patch of plum trees that grew along the trail between the lake house and my grandpa's house as well as the lake. It was also surrounded by a forest of birch and evergreens, and up the hill from where it is lies the old pasture that my great grandparents used to use for grazing their cattle (I think, correct me, mom or Jill, if I'm wrong...).

Tree houses come in all shapes, all sizes, all climes and a dazzling array of styles. They are defined as a building constructed above the ground among the branches of or near the trunk of a tree. After perusing the internet, the term "treehouse" seems to apply to anything built above the ground in near proximity to trees. From the family home to the destination hotel to the ultimate children's hideaway, these things are going places (mostly up). Maybe they've always been around in such a multitude of designs, but the internet makes them much more visually accessible than in the past, if it is so.

Here are some of the most interesting, eco-friendly and visually appealing tree houses that I've come across (thank you, Evan, for some of these leads!).

1. Free Spirit Spheres

These hanging wooden spheres can be found dangling in the temperate rainforest of Vancouver Island, Canada. They are delightfully named Eve and Eryn and can be rented for one to three people at $125 to $175 a night. They are suspended from three trees using ropes, so they sway with the trees a little, as well as move when people inside shift their weight. The website also sells spheres for the head over heel types. They come in wood or fiberglass.

(I swear I'm not being paid to write this)

There are other hotel destinations like this. I find them pretty exciting in the ways of environmentally friendly travel. Flying, taxi-ing, staying in hotels, eating pre-packaged and restaurant food--all of these aspects of travel have pretty large impacts on the environment. I know my wanderlust pales in comparison to others...and I'm not one to let it go unsatiated for too long; so, it's great that there are options to help lessen that impact while basking in the beauty of a forest seen from a piece of architectural art.

There are many tree house resorts in tourist driven tropical countries, but it seems a bit harder to find them in other areas. Here are some links to a couple in the states...

• Out'N'About, Oregon: This resort has several different priced and different sized houses. The website is shitty, but the accomodations look sweet. And hey, they're in Oregon, pretty cool.
• Cedar Creak Treehouse, Washington: This one makes me drool, really, I'm salivating over this place right now. It's solar powered, near Mount Rainier and fifty feet above the ground in a cedar forest...awesome.
• River of Life Farm, Missouri: This resort is located along the Fork River near the Mark Twain National Forest, the tree houses look pretty great, and most of them have fire places! There are also some normal cabins and a lodge for larger groups.

2. Korowai Tree Houses, Papua New Guinea

Many jungle tribes of the world live in tree houses on stilts above the jungle floor. Most of them do this to avoid the dangers and annoyances associated with scavenging animals. People that live near rivers or other large bodies of water often have houses on stilts too, for obvious reasons--to save their homes in the event of seasonal floods.

The Korowai of Papua New Guinea, however, have their houses on stilts 40 meters (that's really high, fyi) above the forest floor for wholly different reasons--they need to protect themselves from cannibalistic hunters from a rival tribe. They have special poles to reach their treetop abodes that can be pulled up in the case of intruders; they can also be seen from any place in the home--movement of the pole is suspect to investigation.

3.Building with Whole Trees

This beautiful, Wisconsin home was built using whole trees for framing and other structural purposes. Roald Gunderson, the owner and architect, has been toying with whole tree construction since the late nineties and has made some stunning houses.

He harvests small diameter, young trees from his forested property after he has trained them to grow in certain ways. Arches support much more weight than traditional building styles, so he molds the trunks of the trees into arches over a few years. He harvests ash, aspen and other quick growing, fast spreading trees and claims that getting them out when they are young is like thinning a carrot patch--it helps the other trees capture more sunlight and grow into healthier adult trees.

He also uses larger trees that have been felled by weather or disease, but he doesn't harvest healthy large trees for lumber. A whole tree can support fifty percent more weight than the lumber made from the same tree. The large trees hold a special beauty and warmth.

I love these houses! They are cheap, environmentally friendly (no clear cutting, low heating cost, generally smaller homes, reclamation of already felled trees), and beautiful! He now has anarchitecture/construction company that builds whole tree homes for interested families. After building twenty houses, he says his forest shows no signs of logging. Very cool.

4. Tree House Restaurant

This restaurant in Okinawa, Japan isn't built on a real tree...but it's pretty cool, and worth taking a look at. The base is modeled after a banyan tree, and the restaurant supposedly serves organic food harvested from a nearby farm. Pretty sweet for a fake tree restaurant.

(The phoniness of this "tree house" was menially alleviated by the fact that it serves local food)