My brother and I had a treehouse in the front yard at our old house. Well, we had a dilapidated little plywood box perched precariously in the joint of a tree in the front yard at our old house. It was a ‘home’ we had to share with lots of decaying leaves and a few unidentifiable cocoons (unidentifiable because I refused to look at them too closely in case whatever was inside suddenly hatched right into my face).
There might have been a bench of a seat of some kind, or you could prop your little kid tush against one of the exposed branches that provided support in the corners. It had two or three squares cut out for windows with flaps that latched closed, one rectangle cut out for a door, and perhaps there was a piece of wood on hinges that swung into place to close the doorway.
(I very well may have invented that safety precaution, but I’ll stand by it because I think I remember being frustrated that the door shut out all remnants sunlight and it was too dark to play, so dark that you might even wonder if the sun had been permanently eclipsed by a cloud of debris from a giant meteor. And where’s the fun in that, unless you’re playing we’re-about-to-go-extinct-caveman house.)
Our treehouse did not have window boxes full of flowers (like my dad built for our real house) or gingham curtains (though I’m sure I suggested curtain making to my mom as if it was just another item on the to-do list) or a trap door or a porch or a bucket-pulley system for delivering meals and books and stuffed toys or a mailbox and little address numbers tacked to the door (wouldn’t that have been cute to call it 15 1/2 Woodstone Road?) or a turret or a hammock.
What it did have was a rope ladder that you could hoist up to keep out intruders. Unless you were afraid to climb the rope ladder. Yes, that was me. So playing in the treehouse involved convincing my dad to get the real ladder out of the garage and hold it steady while I climbed up.
Rather than renovate, our treehouse was condemmed by my parents (or perhaps a treehouse contractor stopped by?) and torn down.
It’s not something I think about a lot, but I do love looking at other people’s treehouses to see what feats of arboreal living they have constructed and what whimsy they have dreamed up.
So I was interested to see Jill’s article at Inhabitat about the O2 Sustainability Treehouse constructed entirely of sustainable materials and installed without harming the tree.
Since both treehouses and geodesic domes smack of idealism and youthful fun – you know that the two were meant to come together at some point or another.
Check out Inhabitat and see even more photos in the O2 Sustainability. My favorite is the nighttime shot. It really does look like a paper lantern.
It also reminds me of the high-tech manual ice cream ball?
But don’t even get me started on ice-cream making. Give me a couple of plastic bags and I could have made my own ice cream in my old tree-shack.
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