Tree Houses

These incredible looking tree houses are called ‘Free Spirit Spheres’ and are designed by Tom Chudleigh, and is an eco-friendly living quarter that was created to co-exist unobtrusively with its forest environment. Wooden spheres are built much like a cedar strip canoe or kayak, suspension points are similar to the chain plate attachments on a sailboat and the stairways hang from a tree much like a sailboats shrouds hang from the mast. If you are more curios about these awesome tree houses you can see tour of this tree house in the video below.

The 4TreeHouse was designed by Lukasz Kos a masters student at the University of Toronto’s School of Architecture & Design. Posing as a Japanese lantern on stilts, Kos’ creation floats within the fir trees on Lake Muskoka, Ontario, an elegant slatted structure that scales the trees and lets light radiate down it’s core. - Via - Inhabitat

Sybarite is one of the most exciting architectual practices in London. The conceptual treehouse pictured above is one of the projects from UK-based Sybarite design. This treehouse is a modular system which capitalises on the beauty of its setting whilst minimising its impact upon it. The layout, along with panoramic windows, maximise benefit of the sun path, orientated so the kitchen enjoys morning light whilst the living and bedroom spaces have the pleasure of the sunset and twilight. The flexible form, comprised of modular prefabricated sections, enables configurations ranging from one to five bedrooms. The company’s site reports, “The prefabricated design can be installed on site within two weeks and is extremely lightweight, uses many recycled products, is part self-sustainable and low on maintenance.”

Three MIT designers - Mitchell Joachim, Lara Greden and Javier Arbona - created this living tree house in which the dwelling itself merges with its environment and nourishes its inhabitants. This home concept is intended to replace the outdated design solutions at Habitat for Humanity. Until now this house is just a concept, an a really cool one. Despite its odd exterior, the house will look normal on the inside. The walls, packed with clay and plastered over, will keep out the rain, and modern technology will be welcome. You can find more informations about this project here, and below is a short video ( 18 sec ) that presents the house.

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. - Via - NyTimes

German cooperative Baumraum knows how to keep imagination alive in their homes. They create treetop dwellings which integrate beautifully into their forested surroundings, and preserve the integrity of the trees that support them. With the breezy playfulness of a hammock and the trusted stability of an old oak tree, baumraum won’t make you grow up to enjoy a sophisticated house. Now you can have your very own treehouse with a cool design thanks to Baumraum an architects studio from Germany.

Dustin Feider had a different vision: one that would be good for the tree, the environment and the deep human need to reconnect with nature and our primordial roots. Through his company, O2 Treehouse, Feider is out to revolutionize not merely treehouses but the entire concept of habitat. All the materials used for the treehouse are entirely recycled - and while the original O2 Sustainability Treehouse is 13 feet wide, interiors and sizes can be customized according to customer specifications.

When the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland laid out plans to create the largest public gardens in all of Europe, they commissioned the TreeHouse Co. to create a gigantic tree house that would house a 120-seat restaurant, a retail shop, two classrooms, and tow private dining rooms. Opened in January, 2005, the Treehouse at Alnwick Gardens is a labyrinth of turrets, treetop walkways, and cavernous spaces. At 6,000 square feet, it’s one of the largest wooden tree houses in the world.

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.

Of course, not all tree houses are avante garde examples of design and sustainability - some people live in far more traditional tree houses such as the tree dwellers shown in the photographs above. In the jungles of the Brazza River Basin in the Indonesian province of Papua the local tribes have slowly built their way up into the trees to escape pests and one another. Their residences now reach dizzying heights of over 100 feet.

This amazing Vietnamese tree house structure is a “tree house” in an entirely unconventional sense of the phrase and draws tourists and guests from around the world. Of course not just anyone can get permission to build a house like this: it helps to be the daughter of the ex-president of the country. Tourists are even able to stay in the rooms overnight.

It’s one thing to chain oneself to a tree in order to save it, but quite another to live in one! In order to save 400+ year old trees, a group of activists has been doing just that on impromptu suspended platforms that currently constitute the tallest “tree house” in the world (top images above). One clever designer has developed a series of conceptual strategies shown in the above images to take this approach to the next level. With just 13% of these old-growth trees left, these new structures would link from tree to tree providing habitats but also protecting the natural environment.