Treehouses Around the World.         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.

木栱屋 The Sami (indigenous skandinavian) Goahti (turf home)

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.
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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.
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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. by http://naturalhomes.org