Living on the Trees

Living on the Trees

Ashim Kumar Paul

The concept of ascending a tree for refuge, or just to glimpse the earth from another perspective, is certainly as vintage as humanity. Tree houses are chronicled in ancient civilizations and their lore crosses through the history of every part of the world where trees grow. The tree house can successfully take its own various forms as the imagination can do such as a teahouse, a restaurant, a hotel, a playhouse for children, or a perch. In course of time, the tree house may also turn out to be the eventual emblem of life in symbiosis with nature for its ecological sustainability. Whether rustic or contemporary in style, tree houses make the most of space.

The tree houses draw our attention for a certain amount of reasons.  The ideas of seclusion, sustainability, cosiness, communion with nature are the best gifts that the tree houses can offer. No doubt, in most times, those are qualities that are felt rather than understood. For many youngsters, the first real architectural impulse to want a nest among the trees is really startling. But tree houses can keep hold of their magic for adults, as well.

The idea of tree houses was originated long before the age of patents, and history has not recorded the first one ever to be built. But it is conspicuous to all that tree houses were used as the permanent abodes in jungles for a couple thousand years. Tree houses were practical for keeping people safe at night from preying jaguars or tigers, protecting food from scavengers, keeping a lookout for invaders, etc. They may seem very safe, but they can be difficult to run from as needed, are susceptible to being cut or burned down if under attack, and are still visited by monkeys and birds looking to find snacks.

However, it is found from another source that the tree houses have actually a long and rich history in the real world. Tree dwellings can be traced back to the people of the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, who lived in trees to provide secure homes for their families. They came and went via thatched baskets that were raised and lowered down the tree trunk. In the Middle Ages, Fransiscan monks used very basic tree-rooms to meditate, and Hindu monks also lived in tree houses to free themselves from earthbound considerations.

Many centuries later, the Renaissance period in the early 1500s brought a renewed interest in Classical culture, and the tree house became a must-have in Florentine gardens. In the mid-19th century, a town just west of Paris called Plessy Robinson became famous for its tree house restaurants, where chic Parisians could be found during their leisure time. The restaurants were built in chestnut trees, covered in rambling roses and had 200 tables at the height of its popularity. Meals were hoisted up to diners in a basket pulley and often consisted of roast chicken and champagne.

British nobility also enjoyed their tree houses, and they became an important part of the culture in Tudor England. It was said that Queen Elizabeth I dined in a massive linden tree. These English tree houses were attached to the tree using rope, which would be tied in summer months and un-tied in winter months to allow the tree to grow. One of the oldest tree houses still in existence is located in a 500-year-old lime tree in Pitchford, England. It was designed in the popular English Tudor style, and is known as "The Tree with a House in It."

In more recent times, Winston Churchill constructed a tree house 20 feet (609.6 centimeters) high in a lime tree at his Chartwell Manor home, and John Lennon was rumored to have a tree house overlooking the Strawberry Fields orphanage.

The internet has spread treehouse popularity globally and led to certain treehouse building companies growing into international building specialists. Some push the envelope with amazing engineering concepts. Others focus on sustainable design. Some are works of art with unlimited budgets, while others are simple forts for kids.

Some wonderful tree houses around the world

1. Too High Treehouse

Completed in Spring, 2004, Terunobu Fujimori, a professor of Architecture at the University of Tokyo, built his boyhood dream hideaway in Takasugi-an (Chino, Nagano), a teahouse on stilts, in the bottom of his father's garden. So said his father when he saw it: "There goes Terunobu, making something wacky again."

2.   Nescafé Treehouse

This amazing treehouse above was designed by Takashi Kobayashi, one of Japan's leading treehouse creators. This house was designed after an advertising agency in Tokyo, hired him to design a treehouse for a Nescafé commercial now running on Japanese television. Mr. Kobayashi built an oval bird's nest of a house, 12 feet high and 9 feet in diameter, reached by a circular staircase, and the final price for this tree house was about $38,000. The house is located on a field there owned by the town of Kamishihoro, where it remains an enticing, if off-limits, gift from Nestlé, the makers of Nescafé, to the people of Hokkaido.

1 3.  Free Spirit Spheres

Free Spirit Spheres can be hung from the trees as shown, making a tree house. They can also be hung from any other solid objects or placed in cradles on the ground. There are four attachment points on the top of each sphere and another four anchor points on the bottom. Each of the attachment points is strong enough to carry the weight of the entire sphere and contents.

The spheres are The outside surface is then finished and covered with a clear fibreglass. The result is a beautiful and very tough skin. The skin is waterproof and strong enough to take the impacts that come with life in a dynamic environment such as the forest.

  4.   The Dome

This geodesic dome perched in an olive tree uses natural pine, cork and clay for construction in a Spanish ecovillage. Like the Fab Tree Hab, this structure combines the general form of a geodesic dome with the sustainability of an earthship.

  5.   TreeHouse Workshop

The TreeHouse Workshop is a Seattle-based company that takes the art of constructing tree houses extremely seriously. They build an average of one tree house per month and hire extremely able builders and carpenters to construct their projects. Their finished works vary in luxury but some even include (counterintuitive!) fireplaces.

  6.   Le Lit Perché

Alain Laurens, a former chairman of a major French advertising agency, left his position there in 1999 to found La Cabane Perchée, a Paris-based studio that designs and builds treehouses. The firm's projects are unusually elegant by treehouse standards, but none so much so as Le Lit Perché, a roomy 42-square-foot bed made from six segments of mattress perched on a red cedar platform within a railing of slender steel cables. Mr. Laurens, 59, built the first one in 2005, 24 feet above the ground at his own country house in Bonnieux, in the South of France, and has since built 12 more for customers. Le Lit Perché, which costs $15,000, “is for people to sleep in trees” without having to spend the money to build an entire treehouse, Mr. Laurens said. It features a pulley system that raises and lowers a basket that can be filled with food, wine or other supplies. For those who find being suspended in mid-air (or completely exposed to the elements) scary, and not conducive to romance, the bed can be placed as low as six feet off the ground.

  7.   Everybody's Treehouse

When Bill Allen builds treehouses, he does not look for the perfect tree, sturdy with thick, embracing limbs and an abundant canopy of leaves. Mr. Allen's nonprofit company, Forever Young Treehouses in Burlington, Vt., founded in 2002, designs its houses to be accessible to handicapped and chronically ill children, and “the first thing we look for is the ground dropping away” from the start of the access ramp, he said, so that the ramp doesn't need to climb too high to reach the house. He also likes to build in a grove of trees so the ramp can meander from tree to tree. Everybody's Treehouse, which cost $450,000 and which Mr. Allen completed in January in the Mount Airy Forest park in Cincinnati, is a typical Forever Young project. Its 160-foot ramp winds among 14 trees (red and white oaks, maples and ash) as it climbs 15 feet to a 2,000-square-foot house with two asymmetrical cedar-shingle roofs that give it a Hansel-and-Gretel look. The structure is made of tongue-and-groove pine boards with an ipê-wood deck and has eight windows; most start 32 inches from the floor, an ideal height for wheelchair occupants. “For a kid in a wheelchair,” Mr. Allen said, “it gives a different perspective of what the world looks like, of what a tree looks like, of what a forest looks like."

  8.   Wilkinson Residence

Architect, artist, magician, Robert Harvey Oshatz is all of that and so much more. He is the organic architect responsible for this magnificent home up in the canopy; the coolest house in the trees that you will likely ever see. The unique Wilkinson Residence graces the wooded landscape outside of Portland, Oregon. This treehouse would turn even the Swiss Family Robinson green with envy. More than likely you too will have a more than a twinge of desire to live in it.

  9.   Spider's Leg Tree house

We're no strangers to Germany's tree house makers extraordinaire Baumraum, so when we saw another brilliant arboreal home design from them, we knew we had to share it with you! The house resides at World of Living , a showspace/amusement park for sustainable housing company WeberHaus and greets visitors with its curvy body perched atop super skinny spider-like "legs". The unusual shape and clean lines are Baumraum's signature, and there are a lot of other cool features, so check them all out in our slide show.

  10.   Tree house Restaurant

The Naha Harbor Diner in Okinawa, Japan, lies at the very top of a huge Gajumaru tree about 20 feet above the ground. Sadly, that is not a real Gajumaru tree, it's actually concrete. Customers actually have to get in an elevator inside the trunk to reach the restaurant.

  11.   Beach Rock Tree house

This treehouse by Japanese builder Kobayahsi Takashi was constructed with the express purpose of communicating with outer space. “A sparkling beacon among treetops, it is easy to imagine the dome succeeding at its mission to make contact with alien life,” writes Nelson.

  12.                     Island Wood Bogwon Tree house

The Island Wood "Bogwon" treehouse in Washington is supported by a single tree. Engineer Jake Jacob and his team from the TreeHouse Workshop fixed the house to the trunk with a series of limb-hugging rings. "Our trees are actually perched, as opposed to nailed in," he told us. "The tree might move in the wind and we don't want to inhibit the tree to be able to move in the wind."

  13.                     Crystal River Tree house

There is always a place for fun and frivolity in architecture! David Rasmussen, resident treehouse expert, designed and built this “treehouse” with log columns as the main support, since the trees on the property are not strong enough to build on.