Live the high life
Treehouses aren’t just for children any more — and could add value to your home
tHE days are getting longer and the garden is coming back to life: what could be better than building a treehouse for the family?
You would be in good company. Sting and Trudie Styler have one in Tuscany, the Beckhams have one on their Cotswolds estate and J.K. Rowling’s pair, resembling Hogwarts, sit in her Edinburgh garden.
Treehouses are no longer just for children and playing: now they’re for grown-up parties or family glamping weekends as well. So long as you have the budget and space, you need three other things — the right tree to anchor the structure, a plan of what you want, and consent from your council.
Experts say the best trees are mature oak, maple, fir or beech: these are sturdy enough to hold bolts supporting a treehouse when people are inside.
Flatpack build-it-yourself kits tend to be single playrooms on stilts and range from £ 500 to £ 2,000. If you want something customised or larger, design your own on paper before calling in a specialist firm.
Decide if the treehouse is to be just a den for children, a larger two or threeroom house, or a flamboyant ‘ minihouse’ for the family to sleep in or to accommodate friends or guests.
If it’s principally for young children, it should be less than 6ft off the ground. If older children and adults are the users, fun accessories such as a crow’s nest, a rope swing or bridge, a slide, electric lighting, a net climb or even a zip wire can be added. But make sure they are put into the design as it’s sometimes difficult to add them later.
‘The change over the past decade has been in price, ambition and specification,’ explains Simon Payne of Blue Forest, one of Britain’s most up-market treehouse manufacturers.
This is the high end of the treehouse market where even the lowest spec version costs £40,000 — and his firm has built several costing £500,000 or more.
‘ Most families want treehouses to be usable by everyone in the household, so there are play areas for children, but also one room could be an office, there may be a hot tub, a rest area and even a fire pit,’ says Payne.
Whether your idea is modest or expansive, it’s wise, before you commit to expenditure, to informally run it past your council planning department.
MoSTplanners will offer advice on the telephone and can advise on whether your idea is likely to meet council rules.
If it’s all systems go, a specialist treehouse builder can refine the idea and handle the formal application: you typically pay upwards of £170 to the council which takes ten weeks for a decision.
Specialist manufacturers (there are more than a
dozen in the UK) are skilled at configuring a treehouse to avoid looking into gardens, be positioned away from boundaries and not be visible from the road — the most common causes of complaints.
Henry Durham, who runs High Life Treehouses, says: ‘They’re more popular than ever. Parents see them as a way of getting children away from computer screens and Xboxes, but they’ve also become party venues for grown-ups and some people even let them out commercially on Airbnb and the like.’
High Life’s treehouses cost from £ 10,000 to £150,000 — the latter with four bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen.
Now there’s an extra bonus to treehouses, too, when you come to sell up.
Estate agent William Wells, director of home counties’ company Mullucks, says that a treehouse could boost the sale price of a property if it was big enough for outdoor entertaining, while a more traditional one aimed at children could end up helping the sale go through.
‘Pester power is important and if young children pester parents on a place they like, it might just make the difference between success and a near miss,’ says Wells.
So go on, bring out your inner Tarzan and swing over to the treehouse set.
GRAHAM NORWOOD