Lofty Treehouse Designs

CUSTOM TREEHOUSES CUSTOM TREEHOUSES

Builders capitalize on a growing market

By Sara Graves

Today’s treehouses are so much more

than you may remember from childhood. With price tags and amenities equivalent to a fully furnished home, it’s no wonder that many builders are looking to the trees for new inspiration.

Pete Nelson, one of the pioneers of the modern treehouse and the star of Animal Planet’s television show Treehouse Masters, builds approximately 10 to 12 treehouses per year from his headquarters in Fall City, WA. He primarily builds treehouses for high-end clientele ranging from $400,000 to $800,000.

“We had a recent design quote come back and it was $995,000 for a Kentucky treehouse outside of a mansion that was quoted with a bridge to an outdoor, roofed drive-in theater, a bunk house, a chaperone quarters with a bathroom, a 13- by 21-ft. sports building to accommodate badminton and pickleball, another building with a small kitchenette and bathroom with a staircase leading up to a crow’s nest 43 feet up in a very tall oak tree. The clients wanted to be able to zipline or slide down to a splash pool, with a nearby rock climbing wall and fire pool.”

“I thought at first that we were going to build simple refuges in the trees, but it has become treehouses with amenities, such as kitchens and bathrooms,” Nelson said.

Dan Wright, CEO of Tree Top Builders, Inc., Treehouse Supplies, Inc. and Treehouse World, Inc., Exton, PA., added that his company builds his projects with a combination of engineered wood beams, steel fabrication, and regular pressure treated lumber for the substructure of their projects. He added that their projects range from a small $20,000 backyard treehouse

ABOVE: Bella Luna, a luxury treehouse nestled in the treetops in Mt. Rest, S.C., that can be rented on AirBnB. It is a sister treehouse to the Stella Vista, both of which are owned and rented by Come Sleep in the Trees. (Photo by jblandingphotography.com)

to a $200,000-$500,000 luxury or commercial project.

In addition, they build tree decks with any of the same lumber, composite and metal material options that are available for ground deck construction. When it comes to bridges, they typically use aircraft cable wire ropes and thick diameter ropes to support tension bridges and fill the sides with netting. He added that they have seen a rise in clients replacing balusters and netting with metal wire panels as the top railing infill option.

The beauty of today’s treehouse building is that the pioneers of the modern treehouse—Pete Nelson, Michael Garnier, and Charley Greenwood—created the treehouse hardware that is still in use today and kept it nonproprietary so other builders could build treehouses as well.

In early testing, these pioneers learned that trees grow and move from their tips and grow in girth, but they don’t grow up from the ground unless they are a young sapling.

“In multiple tree treehouses, the trees move independently of each other, trees will bend to south, even if it’s a north wind,” said Garnier, a Cave Junction, OR., treehouse builder who appeared on DIY Network’s The Treehouse Guys. “You can have one tree going to the north and one going to the south. You have a dynamic horizontal force.”

Nelson added that trees need to move independently. “If you try to pin between two trees, a treehouse will break in the first windstorm. We perch a beam on top of the Treehouse Attachment Bolt (TAB).”

A TAB, also called a Garnier Limb, is

UPPER RIGHT: North Carolina treehouse, built by Pete Nelson, was inspired by the Star Wars flagship Millennium Falcon, including an office/ cockpit space and a ring of windows overlooking a lake that resemble Millennium Falcon thrusters when viewed from the exterior. (Photo by Nelson Treehouse)

LOWER RIGHT: O2 Treehouse founder Dustin Feider, uses a sledgehammer while hanging from the tree, to install Treeton hardware designed for a steel cable attachment. (Photo provided by Alissa Kolom, Alikolphoto.com)

ADDITIONAL HARDWARE is used to secure the treehouse, including the dynamic uplift arrestor, shown above that allows the treehouse to “slide” laterally as the tree moves with the wind. (Photo by Nelson Treehouse)

THE TAB, shown held above, is composed of a threaded section that is bore into the tree a couple of inches until it covers a portion of the boss, the thicker mid section. The treehouse rests on the unthreaded section that hangs beyond the tree. (Photo by Nelson Treehouse) made of the stem of a metal bolt that is drilled into the tree trunk, a thicker mid-section called a “boss,” and a perch that the treehouse beam rests upon.

“The more weight, the stronger the attachment you need,” Garnier said. “If you don’t have a dynamic spot, the metal will fatigue, like a lag bolt or a Garnier Limb. The horizontal force is enough to move a piece of metal back and forth.”

To prevent the metal fatigue, Garnier said they use a hardened 4140 steel. For higher horizon loading, they use a spring steel that can bend without breaking.

O2 Treehouse, Oakland, CA., builds their treehouses differently than others. Instead of solely relying on TABs in their construction, they also use a suspension cable rigging to “hang” their treehouses from the trunk above in many of their projects.

They fasten a steel cable to a bolt high in the tree, said Niko Kush, O2 Treehouse marketing director. The cable comes down to the treehouse “like a Christmas tree ornament” tied to multiple trees.

O2 uses a proprietary piece of hardware called the Treeton, which is shaped like a cross with two plates that are positioned 90 degrees to each other.

The installer of the Treeton stands on top of a deer stand that is strapped to the tree at the right height. He uses a chainsaw and a plunge cut jig that is fixed to the side of the tree to make two-equally deep slots directly into the tree a minimum of 1 ft. and a maximum of 1-1/2-ft. deep, depending on the tree and what is needed. Then the Treeton sheet metal hardware is pounded into the tree into the precut slots.

“The complicated part is the jig support structure for the chainsaw to make a knife stab cut into the tree and a second one that is rotated 90 degrees,” Kush said.

He added that the Treeton is equivalent to a TAB that is 3" or 4" thick instead of the normal 1" to 1-1/2" thickness of other TABs.

Kush added that they use cables that are attached laterally to keep the treehouse from swinging left and right.

“The treehouses that are suspended look like they are floating,” Kush said.

Regardless of how treehouses are built, the one thing that these builders share in common is a passion for building them.

“There’s so much work to be done and fun to be had. There are a lot of real quality builders doing it,” Nelson said.