For kids, designers can tailor a wonderland of imagination that spares them from the jutting nails, creaky boards and other safety hazards of a homemade treehouse.
Unsure whether the craftsmanship they learned in their youth was enough to fuel an enterprise — but determined to give it a shot — the Daniels brothers began showing a fairly basic prototype to potential clients in 1998. "We didn't know if it would be a business, but we ended up selling 17 of them in (the first) four days," John says.
Over the next eight years, their company, Daniels Wood Land in Paso Robles, Calif., worked hard to convince homeowners that treehouses could be a professionally designed luxury add-on to a home, like a spa or a remodeled kitchen. Every step along the way, the brothers refined their design, engineering and construction process, and selectively added new talent to their team.
Environmental impact
Once people started to notice the sense of humor and escapism the Daniels duo breathed into their designs — with intricate executions of themes like pirates and castles — sales snowballed. "I thought we had arrived when I sold a $6,000 one," John says. By the end of its first year of business, Daniels Wood Land had sold its first $100,000-plus project.
This year, the company has overseen 10 six-figure projects, and expects to do about $6 million in revenue. Its efforts, along with those of a handful of other treehouse designers that sprouted in the late 1990s, have opened the floodgates on an unexpected new luxury market.
The primary interest of many treehouse buyers is environmental impact. "In the treehouse world, people (normally) don't explore alternative materials. They're usually made of superheavy beams," says Dustin Feider, founder of O2 Sustainability Treehouse.
Feider's company creates 13-foot-diameter spheres out of a steel or aluminum shell surrounded by a tentlike canvas. The spheres are suspended from branches in a manner that has little detrimental effect on the trees. The "canopy treehouses," which can be installed for a fee or shipped as a do-it-yourself kit, cost around $18,800.
A concern any homeowner should have with an investment in a treehouse is how much value they are adding to their home on the whole. Treehouses typically appeal to very individualized tastes, which means they will likely repel many potential buyers but earn great enthusiasm from a select few.
Value matters
Given a good amount of creative freedom by one of his clients in McLean, Va., home designer Anthony Wilder built an elaborate treehouse office in 1997 that connected to the raised back door of the house by way of a cable bridge. Because it blended well with the style of the house and added an isolated space for working as well as entertaining, the addition was one of the prime buying motivators for Bob and Patty Finch, who scooped up the property when it went on the market a few years later.
Wilder built the treehouse and bridge for about $250,000, and says his client probably recouped most of that investment.
While many treehouse designers focus on providing a space just for adults or just for kids, The TreeHouse Company, in Kilmarnock, Scotland, has experience in designs that cater to all ages.
A few years ago, a project in Fife, Scotland, called for a tastefully designed treehouse that would appear to grow out of a 500-year-old, lightning-struck cedar tree. On top of that challenge, The TreeHouse Co. designers needed to create both a play space for the children as well as an entertaining area for the adults.
They constructed a 45-foot spire with cedar shingles, copper turret, side deck, multilevel verandas, zip slide and two staircases — all for the enjoyment of the youth. For the parents, they built a deck under the canopy of a nearby tree and linked the two structures with a bridge. As a result, the adults can enjoy their roughly $90,000 investment in the company of friends while keeping a watchful eye on their kids.
Fit for a duchy
When the duke and duchess of Northumberland laid out plans to create the largest public gardens in all of Europe at Alnwick Castle, they commissioned The TreeHouse Co. to create a gigantic treehouse that would be home to a 120-seat restaurant, a retail shop, two classrooms and two private dining rooms. Opened in January 2005, the Treehouse at Alnwick Garden is a labyrinth of turrets, treetop walkways and cavernous spaces. At 6,000 square feet, it's one of the largest wooden treehouses in the world.
The price? $6 million.
Treehouses aren't just for the home, either. People seeking an adventurous Swiss Family Robinson-style getaway without the pricey investment can look for hotels among the branches. In the heart of the Aberdare National Park in Kenya, visitors to the Treetops Hotel pay about $80 per night for rooms built atop stilts and entwined with trees. The hotel is a great pit stop for safaris, as numerous observation lounges and balconies look down on the favorite watering holes of nearby rhinos, elephants, lions and warthogs.
If you want to see life like the Korowai and Kombai peoples of Papua, Indonesia, who live in huts built 80 to 160 feet off the ground for protection, book a night in the Cedar Creek Treehouse, located 10 miles outside Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state. Designed and constructed by Bill Compher in 1982, the bed and breakfast is a cabin perched 50 feet off the ground in an enormous western red cedar, and includes, for $250 a night, a sleeping loft with two double beds, a fully equipped kitchen and an observation room.
See BusinessWeek's slide show on luxury treehouses.
By Douglas MacMillan, BusinessWeek.com
