Dustin Feider by no means anticipated to grow to be a full-time treehouse designer. However for the final twenty years, he’s made a profession out of constructing treehouses as a type of artwork. In one in every of his initiatives, a geometrical pod formed like a pinecone is suspended 50 toes above the bottom inside a grove of large redwood timber.
In one other undertaking, tucked behind a home in Northern California, a 30-foot-high spiral staircase results in a big wood deck for dinner events, with tunnels beneath for kids to play. Throughout a rope bridge, a geodesic dome hangs within the air between one other cluster of redwoods. In L.A., one other spherical treehouse was exhibited on the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork after which put in within the yard of Doorways guitarist Robby Krieger.
These aren’t typical treehouses—and a few can price as a lot as an precise home. Feider’s firm, O2 Treehouse, costs a minimal of $50,000 for a base customized mannequin. However its common treehouse prices an eye-popping $400,000.
Feider began interested by treehouses in a category undertaking when he was learning furnishings design at Minneapolis School of Artwork and Design. He took inspiration from Buckminster Fuller’s well-known geodesic domes. “I used to be contemplating a kind for a contemporary treehouse, with this concept that you could possibly create one thing that was flat-packed and shippable,” he says.
After graduating, he took a sequence of different design jobs, however concurrently put collectively an internet site together with his design. His first shopper wished a geodesic treehouse mounted 50 toes up a poplar tree in Wisconsin. Initially, Fieder thought the treehouses could be the primary in a sequence of various merchandise that targeted on sustainable design. However they rapidly grew to become so fashionable that he by no means stopped making them.
After some early media protection, he began working with a shopper in Beverly Hills, after which ended up constructing treehouses for others on the identical block. The initiatives stored coming, and Fieder realized that he had a viable enterprise. “I believed, wow, this could work,” he says. O2 Treehouse now employs round 40 folks, together with woodworkers and metalworkers who construct prefab elements in a store in Northern California, designers, and three building crews.
The method takes time. First, the crew visits a brand new web site and begins sketching and discussing early concepts with the shopper. In addition they rigorously research the obtainable timber—one thing that’s made simpler with iPhones, which now have LiDAR scanners that may map out a tree’s precise kind.
The design and engineering course of often takes three months. Prefabricating the elements takes one other three months, and set up usually takes three months as nicely. Some initiatives take longer; one treehouse accomplished in 2024 took a yr and a half to complete.
The corporate has customized {hardware} that helps securely connect the treehouses to timber with out proscribing the timber’ motion. The load is big: the dangling “pinecone,” for instance, weighs 5.5 tons. However giant timber can assist the buildings with out harming the tree’s well being. “The timber develop outward and mainly seal across the {hardware},” Fieder says. “It’s a pure strategy of therapeutic that wound.”
Thus far, the corporate has constructed greater than 100 treehouses. Most are for recreation, although Fieder has envisioned extra advanced designs that might function houses. “The concept being that while you purchase a brand new property, you don’t should clear the timber to construct your own home,” he says. “We really plan the programming of your own home across the timber are already on web site, creating courtyards and an indoor-outdoor sort of dwelling house.”
The corporate is now starting to construct treehouses the place friends can keep by means of a franchise it calls Treewalkers, starting with a glamping web site close to Atlanta.
As folks ascend into the tree cover, wanting by means of a treehouse’s giant home windows at a brand new view of the woods, Fieder needs to assist encourage them to take higher care of the planet. “I’ve been on this mission to reconnect folks with nature by means of these architectural experiences within the woods,” he says. Treewalkers “will enable us to launch our works from personal backyards and open it to the general public.”
