One thing we all seem to have in common is we all love
treehouses. You can find all of the treehouses in this collection
plus many others in this
Natural Homes album on our Facebook page.
Ireland
France
Laos
This beautiful treehouse is by Christy Collard
from Cork, Ireland. Christy specialises in organic, spiral
designs. His
facebook page is at and deserves far more than the 265
Likes it currently has. You can read about his work at a small
reforestation project in
Lalibela, Ethiopia where he created some beautiful spaces.
This is 'La Cabane Cocon' (The Cocoon
Treehouse). It uses a light steel framework to support the woven
branches but otherwise it natural. The same structure could be
built with a bamboo frame or similar. It was built by Jean-Yves
Behoteguy, a French 'sculpteur sur bois' (sculptor of wood).
Here's a video of 'La
Cabane Cocon'.
This is 'The
Gibbon Experience', a lush and peaceful jungle where you can
learn how to find fresh water in the vines and which flowers and
plants are edible. The treehouse is on three levels, three
bedrooms, a living room/kitchen area and a bathroom all accessible
by zip lines.
Germany
Costa Rica
Canada
This is probably the least invasive version of
a treehouse being supported by straps from higher branches rather
than anchored into the trunk of the tree. It's a design from
ErlebNest
who also sell components to make your own
treehouse.
The cocoon like part of the design is a sleeping pod that has a
canvas to cover the top if you're not quite ready for a night
under the stars.
Finca
Bellavista is a residential treehouse community for about 100
people in the south Pacific coastal mountains of Costa Rica. Its
23 treehouses and 27 zip-lines are set in a rustic, comfortable,
solar and hydro off-grid retreat of 300 acres of forest saved from
the loggers. Here�s more about the community on
YouTube with a gallery of their
treehouse pictures.
This
Hemloft was made using reclaimed materials, some of which came
from
Craigslist. Like all unique shelters this treehouse, by
carpenter Joel Allen, was a labour of love. Even with good
knowledge of the woods where it stands, it took Joel months to
find just the right tree. The egg shaped bubble, wrapped around
the trunk of the tree, is reminiscent of the
Yellow treehouse in New Zealand.
USA
Scotland
England
This treehouse was discovered by
Joseph
Ebsworth who has set himself the task of finding all the
hidden treehouses and huts in the woodlands and forests of ski
areas. Happily their location will be kept a secret but if you
give his blog a visit from time to time you're bound to be
entertained by his latest discovery. This particular treehouse in
Breckenridge, CO, USA was built with all natural and reclaimed
materials from the area.
This is a POSH (Port Out Starboard Home)
treehouse built by The Treehouse Company for
The
Lodge, a five star hotel on the banks of Loch Goil deep in
Argyll Forest Park in Scotland. It's used for dinning with a
wonderful view of the loch while snuggled up to its wood burning
stove. Photo with kind permission by
Ralph
Haslett
This is Cliffside Lodge treehouse built by
Blue Forest.
The treehouse sits in a very English garden near Bristol
sensitively hugging an oak without anchors in the tree. The
thatched treehouse, covered with hand cleaved oak shingles, stands
on a ringbeam supported from the ground on stilts. If you were
lucky enough to visit this gently beauty you would see the
magnificent views of the imposing
Clifton
Suspension Bridge.
These are the building stages of a Sami (indigenous
skandinavians) arch-beamed Goahti (turf home). This one was built for the International
Indigenous Festival,
Riddu in Samuelsberg, Norway. The frame is made from birch roundwood pegged together
with wood; no
nails are used. Poles of roundwood are laid against the frame,
pegged and covered with overlapping sheets of birch bark which are
kept in place by layers of turf stacked against the sloping
walls.
The
arch-beamed goahti is called a bealljegoahti in Sami. It consists of
an inner framework of two sets of curved wooden beams, called
bealljek. To get the curved trees you have to look for birch
growing on hillsides. The trees there bend near the root to be
able to grow straight up. The whole structure sits on stones with the final
weight of the turf and its parabolic profile giving it stability.
Literature, dating back to the 1700s, explains how the goahti
was divided into nine areas. The areas were marked by logs or
stones. The main division went straight across from the entrance
to the back wall. In the middle of this was the fire
place (arran in Sami). On both sides of the door were logs that
defined a path to the fire place. The space between the door and the fire
place is called the 'uksa'. From the fire place and back towards
the back wall there were also two wooden logs. This space is called
'boassu', and is the spiritual space in the home. The rooms
on either side of the fire place could be divided into several
sections where people slept, ate and worked.
Different female goddesses occupied the uksa, boassu and arran
and there
were social rules that determined where different family members and
guests should stay in the home.
At the front and back of the home are stone vents, seen here
(above) just at the builder's feet and the picture left, which also shows the
lower layers of birch bark held in place with a thick heavy layer
of turf. All the materials, wood, bark, turf and stone are found
locally. With regular maintenance a bealljegoahti will stand for
many decades. You can see the remains of an abandoned Swedish
goahti (a
torvkåta) on the
Natural Homes Facebook Page.
A goahti like this with a diameter of about 5m (16ft) will use around 200
small trees. If straight trees are not available then during midsummer
the poles can be pressed under large
rocks to dry and straighten. All the trees should be stripped
of their bark with a
drawknife. The ground inside the goahti is slightly sloping
towards the door with all parts of the interior slightly raised in
relation to the uksa.
If you would like to share a collection of pictures showing the
goahti building stages you can find them here, just click your
favourite social media hangout.
Designer Mike Thompson has created an incredible living lamp that is powered by algae! Spotted over at Designboom,
the Latro Lamp derives energy from an algae chamber that requires just
sunlight, CO2, and water to operate. Stick the lamp outside, breathe
into it, and voila, you've created your own bio battery-powered living
lamp.
This algae-powered lamp transforms CO2 into light.
Designed by Mike Thompson, the Latro Lamp gets energy from an algae chamber and needs just sunlight, C02, and water to operate.
The lamp is made possible thanks to a recent discovery made by
researchers at the universities of Yansei and Stanford. The researchers
found that a tiny electrical current can be extracted from algae
during photosynthesis. The Latro Lamp features a battery that stores
energy generated by the algae throughout the day and a light sensor that
controls the lamp's intensity, preventing the algae from becoming
malnourished. Thompson believes this discovery could lead to an algae
revolution: 「As advances in nanotechnology lead to increasingly
energy efficient products, plant life such as algae will become
attractive sources for tapping energy,」 he says.
For now, though, the Latro lamp remains an idealistic design project —
after all, who realistically wants to care for a lamp like a household
pet?
