When Home is... a Treehouse

How is it that treehouses inspire the imagination of adults and children alike? Why do they seem otherworldly? I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of living in a treehouse, which is actually quite surprising given I’ve always been afraid of heights. And I was too scared to climb trees.

Since having my own children though, it seems a fear of heights really does disappear when you have the opportunity to be in a treehouse. On our recent overnight trip to that homestead, we discovered an old treehouse deep in the back garden. Despite a fear of falling from a height (Ned) and splinters (Lily) both children were up the tree before we blinked. They were captivated by the thought of being high in the branches, lost in another world. All their ‘earthbound’ fears seemed to be abandoned.

Is it, as Peter Nelson writes in his book Treehouses: The Art and Craft of Living Out on a Limb, because; ‘They represent freedom: from adults or adulthood, from duties and responsibilities, from an earthbound perspective. If we can't fly with the birds, at least we can nest with them.’?



For me, the thought of living in a ‘real’ treehouse is as inspiring as the thought of living in an old windmill or a houseboat. Even as a child I thought such homes would be a more exciting place to live than a castle or a palace. I wonder about the reality though: getting your grocery bags up the ladder into the tree, or up all the stairs inside that windmill, or across the water to your houseboat. How would the postman find you? Or the plumber?

Yet, would that all be a small price to pay for the freedom of the ‘earthbound perspective’ I most certainly have from living in a house built on a street behind a fence?

Tessa Williams wrote about treehouses for adults in The Telegraph back in 2008. She even found a couple of people who own them:

"Earlier this year, Victoria Harris and her husband had a treehouse built at their home in Hampstead Garden Suburb, London. "It's a luxury, but it's been a wonderful and practical extension to our living space. It's an extra room, without encroaching on the ground space in our garden. I incorporated electricity and internet access into the design, so that I can go there, answer emails in peace, and just enjoy the solitude. It's built in a pear tree and there are pears within reach."

A treehouse has made good business sense for Claire Strickland, who owns a B&B in Normandy: her luxurious treehouse comes with a modern kitchen and bathroom, and sleeps five. Built in two large sweet chestnut trees, it was made from red cedar by the French company La Cabane Perchee. "It cost about £58,000 to build, but we now rent it out for around £780 per week. We have installed a summer kitchen outside, but people stay even in the depths of winter, kept snug by electric radiators and the natural insulation of the fragrant cedar walls.

"People love the escape a treehouse offers," says Claire. "All our guests say they sleep brilliantly up there. We don't quite know why that is, but we put it down to the magic of the tree."

PS: If anyone reading this blog does live in a treehouse, windmill, houseboat, old church, cave or anywhere unique, I’d LOVE to hear your perspective!

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There was a lovely surprise in my inbox the other day from Garden Swings letting me know that they were featuring Some Home Truths on their site. Perhaps if there isn't the room in the backyard for a treehouse, there might be for a garden swing!


Book cover image © Peter Nelson

When Home is... Your Neighbourhood

A month or so ago, we suddenly got cold feet about renovating. The reality of three to four (or six?) months of living through it seemed a little overwhelming. One of the mothers at my daughter’s school told me that they used a camping shower in the backyard when their bathroom was renovated (for four whole weeks...), another told me that if we didn’t move out we would be lucky to finish the renovation still married. Obviously, both comments caused concern.

I’m not a camper and the thought of showering in our backyard which is bordered by three other houses and quite overlooked is not really the same as open-air showering at the beach or in the wilderness, is it?

And there is no way our budget is going to allow moving out. It will barely allow for the actual build, we’re discovering. There goes the marriage.

So, we decided to take a look around. But moving will mean leaving this suburb. A suburb we have grown to love. Yesterday we had lunch with friends around the corner and afternoon drinks with friends up the road. I go to the supermarket, bookshop, cafes and always bump into someone I know. The school is a five minute walk away and the preschool another five minutes. I realised how hard it would be to give those things up.

Now that I have children and spend my days walking around the neighbourhood rather than driving out of it to an office every day, I’ve realised for the first time since my own childhood that the neighbourhood has also become home.

I have a couple of friends who are thinking about moving and to get a bigger house or a larger block of land they will have to move further away. Their partners are fine with leaving the suburb – yes, the commute is greater but they will have more outdoor space for the kids – but my friends are not. It’s not their houses they are sad to leave, having definitely outgrown them, it’s their neighbourhoods and the lives they have made within them.

All the negatives about leaving centre around the neighbours, new friends made at the park around the corner, or the local playgroup or cafe. Their sense of home encompasses more than what lies behind the front gate during this stage of their lives.

And ours too, we’ve decided. We’ll have to take the chance on our marriage and living in disarray for possibly more weeks than I care to consider. We love this house, renovated or not, but more importantly we love where this house sits; in a spot we definitely want to sit for a while longer.

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So while I sit, I have also been busy talking to some interesting people about home lately. Stay tuned for interviews with Pip Robb, owner of Armchair, Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan founder of the amazing American food blog The Kitchn, Fiona Chandler from storage box company Fiona Kate and Isabel Gillies, author of the absorbing memoir Happens Every Day.

I am also about to interview international best-selling author Kate Morton on her thoughts of home and how she manages to create characters out of the houses she writes about in her books. I’m looking forward to hearing about her own 100-year-old house...

How Property Writing & Home mix

When you spend your days writing about other people’s homes, how does that change your own thoughts about ‘home’? Lucy Macken is a property writer for the Sydney Morning Herald and here she tells us how her feelings about ‘home’ have changed:

‘My idea of home has varied over the years, from where ever the majority of my clothes were at any given time in my early 20s (I moved from share house to share house regularly and often in a taxi), to something far more cumbersome in my late 20s and 30s.

Prior to property writing though, the only pre-requisite was it had to be in walking distance from either Newtown or Darlinghurst with a great TV. Views became a must-have briefly, but that was ditched in favour of a backyard in my early 30s. Now that I had kids and I couldn't afford Sydney real estate that managed both.

Home is far more of an investment for us now, which is often a headache when I look up from my desk. After looking at all the images of minimalist, whiter-than-white living areas with sparkling and stark stone bench space, I often forget that that is a fanciful way to live when you're housing three kids, husband, dog and the odd school bag.

That said, I am constantly assessing our needs from a home within the context of the wider real estate market. So we recently decided, for example, not to renovate not because we don't love our house, our street, the parks around us and the schools, but because we would be over-capitalising. So sad, but true.

What defines our home has become increasingly related to our immediate neighbourhood rather than our own house, but that is more due to the kids than writing about real estate.

I finally get what they mean when they say location is everything. It's not just the name of the suburb, but how close are we to transport? How close are the parks or water? Is it a quiet street or a risk to life every time we run outside? What are the neighbours like?

Living in the inner west, the proximity of the neighbours makes it more important than ever before to get on with them. You don't communicate by lawyer but more over the back fence, asking for the ball to be kicked back or to apologise when it lands in someone's dinner.’