Spend a night in the woods
Pacific Northwestern treehouse hotel sits in otherworldly forest
The drive to Treehouse Point, half an hour east of Seattle, takes you through a forest fit for hobbits, crowded full of fir, spruce, cedar, maple and hemlock. Alongside the Raging River — yes, that’s its name — you get to a gate, punch in a secret code and enter a realm where it’s perfectly normal to sleep in a tree, surrounded by clever carpentry and birdsong.
With seven elevated perches spread across the flora, Treehouse Point has been growing for 19 years, propelled in part by creator Pete Nelson’s fame as a treehouse designer and the former host of “Treehouse Masters” on Animal Planet.
The property’s treehouses, each one of a kind and uniquely named, are priced at $325 to $625 a night, breakfast included. Five have water-flush toilets and sinks. The
Upper Pond unit has a composting toilet and the Bonbibi unit relies on access to the bathhouse’s toilets and showers.
Now that I’ve spent a rainy winter night in one of the treehouses, I can tell you that this setting was spectacular. The room was snug as a lumberjack’s lunchbox.
The story of these treehouses begins in the mid-1960s in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where 7-yearold Nelson’s father put up a backyard treehouse. Years later, after meeting his wife-to-be, Judy, Nelson set about building a treehouse himself. Then another.
Treehouses, he wrote later, “speak in an ancient language and the message is universal: Climb up and be in harmony with nature.”
By 1994, he had published a coffee-table book, “Treehouses: The Art and Craft of Living out on a Limb.” “How could Peter Nelson’s ‘Treehouses’ fail to please?” wrote the Los Angeles Times. “Its subject is immediately attractive, with its implications of escape and fantasy.”
Pete and Judy Nelson bought the Treehouse
Point property in Fall City, Washington, in 2005, beginning with four raw riverside acres. The first treehouse, Temple of the Blue Moon, was completed in 2006. Since then, the Nelsons have built more treehouses, a central lodge, an event space and a bathhouse, nearby a pond and a wedding lawn.
The most recent unit, Ananda, was built in 2021 and is wheelchair accessible. A path goes down to the river’s edge, where you can skip stones or just marvel at the lichen-swaddled tree trunks leaning over the water.
The most popular units? Temple of the Blue Moon, followed by Ananda. The most affordable treehouse? That would be my room, Bonbibi, named for a Bangladeshi goddess of the forest.
As I approached its spiral staircase, I encountered a tour group, beaming after a stroll to the river. “You’re staying overnight?” one of the visitors asked me, envy in every syllable.
At the top of Bonbibi’s stairs, I found a 9-by-12foot room affixed to the broad trunk of a western red cedar. Below sits an outdoors sitting area with a pair of chairs. Inside are a queen-size bed, electricity, a coffee maker, several big windows and just about everything you’d expect in an upscale hotel. For much of the night, the temperature was stable and the sounds of the river, rain and forest were irresistible.
It’s probably not a coincidence that TreeHouse Point has grown along with the Nelsons’ fame.
The Nelsons now have a hand in three other treehouse getaways: Treehouse Utopia in the Texas Hill Country; the Woods Maine in Norway, Maine; and Treehouse Grove at Norton Creek Resort in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
Meanwhile, it turns out that brides and grooms love the idea of spending their wedding nights in a tree. TreeHouse Point is a busy wedding venue, hosting 80 or more ceremonies per year — “up to four a week,” said general manager Bree Monahan.
For non-wedding guests, there’s usually a two-night minimum. (Sunday nights are a good bet if you want to sidestep that.) Treehouse Point doesn’t allow guests under age 16 or pets. To preserve privacy for guests, management doesn’t allow check-ins before 4 p.m. or check-outs after 11 a.m., or drop-in visits by curious passersby. Yoga classes are held most Tuesdays and Thursdays, and visitors can book midday tours.
It’s a fascinating place to prowl, almost ridiculously photogenic. I couldn’t enter the other units, but to me, the architectural star of the show is Trillium, a two-level wonder with 80 windowpanes, all clinging to the ample trunk of a cedar.
Later, I learned that my room, Bonbibi, started out as a 2010 workshop project — built in five days, it included an elevated gazebo, a ship’s ladder and marine spar varnished interior. When the Nelsons expanded it into overnight lodging in 2012, they replaced the ship’s ladder with the spiral staircase. But the upstairs still feels, as Nelson has written, “like a stateroom in a 1930s lakeboat cruiser.”
This is, however, a stateroom with a shared bathroom. When nature called me in the wee hours, I was obliged to descend the 20 steps of that staircase in the rain, then take another 20 steps to the shared toilets and showers of the neighboring bathhouse. At moments like this, it’s good to have a fully charged phone or flashlight. If I’d spent $50 more for a different unit, I’d have had an immediately accessible toilet.
But I slept well.
And waking up — that moment of remembering where I was — made me smile.
Breakfast was a buffet in the lodge, which is pleasantly woodsy with a large roaring fireplace, Wi-Fi (internet is not available in the units) and bookshelves full of volumes on trees and treehouses. And there was plenty of time before checkout for another walk