Nature meets nostalgia: Treehouses return in style
Anthropologists believe our ancient human ancestors spent their time in trees, so it should be no surprise we love treehouses today.
Treehouses of all kinds are experiencing a renaissance.
When an acre-size slice of land in Gold Hill, Colorado, came on the market earlier this year, local resident Jessica Brookhart, 41, snapped it up for $80,000.
The draw for her: The house was a treehouse.
It was a place she could hang out with her husband and two young boys.
“I had never been inside it, but had admired it from a distance,” she said, admitting it was an emotional purchase.
The man who owned the land had built the treehouse with materials from a recycling center in neighboring Boulder. The structure can fit two adults and two children. There’s no bathroom or running water, and a squat potty is outside down on the ground. There’s a camping stove for cooking, and water has to be brought up. From the windows, you can see Longs Peak and the Continental Divide.
She sometimes rents the treehouse out online, and to her surprise, lots of people want to use it.
Treehouses have proliferated during the pandemic. There are stylish backyard ones built by professionals, and makeshift ones thrown up just to escape the four walls of home. There are listings on sites like Airbnb for treehouses to camp in.
Unlike the rickety treehouses of yore, many of these new ones have been upgraded. Most are still accessed with a ladder, however, requiring you to climb.
Business is booming for Aaron Smith, who owns the Fort Collins, Colorado-based treehouse architecture firm Treecraft Design-build. He started it in 2015, and now employs a second designer and eight carpenters.
His treehouses have ranged from a basic backyard structure costing around $10,000 to a livable treehouse with indoor plumbing for half a million. He has clients all over the country.
On social media, a variety of treehouse hashtags on Tiktok pulls up millions of results. On Pinterest, searches for “treehouse homes” are up sevenfold from the year prior. And treehouse rentals have their own section on Airbnb.
More people have been drawn outdoors and into nature during COVID, and treehouses are part of that pattern, said Jeff Galak, associate professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. “They are an attempt to do something fun and interesting and away from other people,” he said.