New Zealand’s Whimsical Yellow Treehouse Restaurant

The new Yellow Treehouse Restaurant by New Zealand based Pacific Environments Architects Ltd. (PEL) is a stunning architectural feat perched high above a redwood first. Appearing for all the world like an enormous chrysalis grafted onto a 40-meter-high redwood tree, the project is constructed of plantation poplar slats, redwood balustrading milled at the site, and makes extensive use of natural lighting throughout.

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Up In the Trees: Madison Square Tree Huts

New York’s Madison Square Garden has taken on a Swiss-Family-Robinson feel lately. This is due to an art exhibition featuring work by Tadashi Kawamata called Madison Square Tree Huts, which emerged completed on October 2. A gathering of small wooden houses up in the trees, folks passing through the park might find themselves grinning upward with wonderment at these small structures meant to shake up our notion of public space and how it interacts with ideas of urbanity, rural romanticism and play.

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Crazy Banyan Treehouse Cafe in Japan

Although this towering concrete treehouse isn’t really green, (unless tree imitation counts as ‘green’), we couldn’t help but be awestruck by its sheer craziness. We thought it worth a post, just for the picture alone. The Naha Harbor Diner in Okinawa, Japan is a life-size rendition of a banyan tree, also known as gajumaru. The aptly-named Banyan Town shopping center near the entrance of Onoyama Park features a twenty foot tall tree with a pan-Asian restaurant nestled amid its branches. Accessible by a spiral staircase around back and an in-trunk elevator, the restaurant specializes in locally grown and organic harvested foods fresh from the farm.

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PREFAB FRIDAY: Retreat to an Ewok Eco Sphere in the Trees

What if we told you you could own your very own Ewok-meets-Aarnio hanging treehouse? Canada-based Tom Chudleigh creates these bubblicious Free Spirit Eco Spheres that sway amidst the coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest. Available for purchase or for rent, they offer a whimsical new way to experience the outdoors.

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BAUMRAUM: Stunning Treehouse Designs from Germany

There’s nothing like a tree-top dwelling to conjure up gilded memories of childhood adventures and endless summers. It’s even better when they’re put together as wonderfully as the ones by Baumraum, who specialize in arboreal abodes. The beautiful tree house above is one of many from Baumraum, serenely sequestered amid the woodlands of Germany where they act as playgrounds, conference spaces, and restful retreats.

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VIDEO: Grow a Treehouse with Terreform

We love treehouses here at Inhabitat and are enamored with eco-architect Mitchell Joachim’s visionary ideas about how to grow living treehouses from ficus molded around frame structures. We’ve covered these playful architectural ideas before on Inhabitat, but now we have a video from Mitchell Joachim explaining the details of how they work. Joachim does better justice to his imaginative ecological designs than we are able to do in a mere post, so if you have any interest in living treehouses (and we know you do), check out the video above.

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O2 SUSTAINABILITY TREEHOUSE by Dustin Feider

As a nod to childhood treehouses and those good old days of youthful splendor, Dustin Feider obsessed himself with developing the perfect eco-friendly version of the tree sanctuary. After much trial and error, the 23-year old freelance furniture designer came up with a unique and green take on the conventional kiddie sanctuary which he dubbed the O2 Sustainability Treehouse. Inspired by the construction of Buckminster Fuller’s infamous geodesic dome, Feider discovered that by following Bucky’s lead, he could use less material and construct a more stable structure than that of the ‘traditional’ treehouse - most importantly, without at all harming the tree.

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ULTIMATE TREE HOUSES AT THE DALLAS ARBORETUM

Leaves Imagination from HNTB & Brad Bell Studios

December marks the last month of the 13 extreme tree houses on display at the Dallas Arboretum. The Dallas Arboretum Ultimate Tree House exhibit is the result of a competition open to local architects in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex to design unique tree houses with regards to two rules…

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4TREEHOUSE by Lukasz Kos

What is it about tree houses that we love so much? Their playfulness, the escapism they offer, and the platforms they provide into nature all come to mind. We have written about the 4Treehouse by Lukasz Kos before, but when we saw it again in this month’s Dwell, the gorgeous glowing image stopped us in our tracks. Posing as a Japanese lantern on stilts, Kos’ creation floats within the fir trees on Lake Muskoka, Ontario.

What’s more, the design frames spectacular views of the forest, from inside, out, down and up!

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GROW YOUR OWN TREEHOUSE

Photo: Richard Reames, Arborsmith

There are houses built in trees and then there are treehouses. Last year, we had one of our first encounters with a home literally made from trees, using the art of weaving (and sometimes grafting) trees together to form structures — a practice ecological designer, Richard Reames, called “Arcorsculpture.” The Fab Tree Hab was one of the design entries for the Index: awards, emerging from the genius of a crew including MIT architect Mitchell Joachim and our friend, Javier Arbona of Archinect. The project description emphasized consideration of whole systems (and ecosystems) in creating a truly sustainable built environment, rather than a piecemeal approach that could yield uncertain longterm outcomes.

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O2 SUSTAINABILITY TREEHOUSE

We’ve covered a lot of fusion tree houses: treehouse meets Jetsons; treehouse meets Modernism; treehouse meets biology experiment. Today, we’ve been introduced to a new pairing from O2 Sustainability: treehouse meets Buckminster Fuller.

Much like the classic treehouse, Bucky’s geodesic dome recalls childhood construction toys and youthful visions of rebuilding the world in a geometric, utopian image. Since both treehouses and geodesic domes smack of idealism and youthful fun - you know that the two were meant to come together at some point or another. It seems only fitting then that O2’s Sustainability Treehouse brings Bucky’s legacy into a living tree to create a high-flying eco-friendly structure.

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ANDREW MAYNARD’S ACTIVIST ARCHITECTURE

Abandon your preconceptions of the architect as a quiet, bespeckled intellectual who cares more about sharp Italian suits and clean concrete lines than about saving trees. Here comes a new breed of architectural environmental activism in rising star Andrew Maynard, who has designed these awesome treehouses in order to protest logging.

The vigilant protection of endangered forests represents an enduring legacy of environmental activism, from the Chipko movement in India in the early 70s to Julia Butterfly Hill’s long sit in the redwoods. Few things deter a logger from felling a tree more effectively than a protester clinging fiercely to its trunk. Except maybe a protest structure that clings to three trunks at once.

On top of being a wildly inventive architect, Andrew Maynard - whose prefabs have been widely lauded for their astounding multiplicity and brilliant design - turns out to be a cleverly scheming activist. Maynard’s Global Rescue Station fastens semi-permanently to the body of three trees, promising not only to shelter and protect protestors during their demonstrations, but to take out anything beneath or around it if a logger dares to cut down its supports.

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BAUMRAUM TREEHOUSES

When designing a treehouse, it’s almost always a good idea to add a little childhood nostalgia and rustic charm to the mix, even if the end result has modern leanings. We’ve talked about treehouses big, small, and uber-futuristic, and each has had its own special flavor; but no matter how you distinguish yours from the rest, once you put a house in a tree, you join the ranks of the make-believe revivalists.

German cooperative baumraum knows how to keep imagination alive in their homes. Combining architecture, landscape design and “arboriculture,” they create treetop dwellings which integrate beautifully into their forested surroundings, and preserve the integrity of the trees that support them. With the breezy playfulness of a hammock and the trusted stability of an old oak tree, baumraum won’t make you grow up to enjoy a sophisticated house.

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TREE HABITATS

No longer just for Ewoks, treehouses have come a long way from the ramshackle plywood thingy your dad pieced together for you in the backyard. A number of architects are taking their inspiration from nature to create beautiful, comfortable, and contemporary dwellings in the trees. Landliving has a great overview of some modern treehouses, from architecture student Lukasz Kos’s Ontario treehouse, to Joel Sherman’s award-winning …

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A LIVING HOUSE - Terreform’s Fab Tree Hab

Inspired by the ecocentric attitudes of such beloved American nature-lovers as Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman and Alcott, three MIT designers - Mitchell Joachim, Lara Greden and Javier Arbona - created this living treehouse in which the dwelling itself merges with its environment and nourishes its inhabitants. Fab Tree Hab dissolves our conventional concept of home and establishes a new symbiosis between the house and its surrounding ecosystem.

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FREE-SPIRIT ECO TREEHOUSE

I just spotted this crazy hanging treehouse, which looks like a cross between those uber 60’s hanging bubble chairs and an Ewok dwelling! Designed by Tom Chudleigh the Free Spirit Sphere is an eco-friendly living quarter that was created to co-exist unobtrusively with its forest environment. I wish these had been around back in the treehouse days of my youth. Too bad these things cost between 100 - 250K. They also have no bathroom and the interior is a bit cramped at 8 sq ft. Guess they are only for the serious tree maven for now. I’m waiting till they release the IKEA version.

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