We’ll Never Climb Down From the Tree House

One of the earliest surviving accounts of tree houses comes from, of all people, first-century philosopher Pliny the Elder. In his Natural History, published around 77 to 79, Pliny recounts a story about the Roman emperor Caligula, who appreciated the bounty of nature despite his tyrannical reputation. Pliny writes that Caligula was so "impressed" by a large plane tree that he had "benches laid loosely on beams consisting of its branches" within and held a banquet, calling it his "nest." Though Pliny’s story is only a few sentences in an expansive text, it neatly summarizes the lingering fascination with the tree house: It marries the sublimity of the natural world with architecture. Caligula was so struck by the plane tree that he didn’t just want to observe it; he wanted to inhabit it.

He isn’t the only one enchanted by the idea. In his account, Pliny also describes a contemporary tree house built in a hollow trunk, suggesting the foliage of the tree was more delightful than the princely decor of marble, painted decorations, tapestries, and gilded paneling. These early accounts resonate even in the 21st century, as tree houses continue to occupy our imagination (and our trees). They offer a respite from civilization, immersion in nature, and an architectural otherness that sparks the imagination all with the thrill of some risk. And the mesh of feelings Pliny identified continues to follow the tree house, nearly 2,000 years later.

The tree house was not just a Roman curiosity; references to it appear in Renaissance texts, most famously two that belonged to the powerful Florentine Medicis. Stefano della Bella’s etching of the tree house at the family’s Villa di Pratolino features stairs that wrap around a massive tree, all man-made elements rendered nearly invisible by all the foliage. Another Medici tree house, in Castello (designed by Niccolò Tribolo), the artist, architect, and writer Giorgio Vasari noted, had an invisible pipe system that carried water "along the branches of this tree, to sprinkle people and to make fearful hissing sounds."

Since the tree house is by its very nature ephemeral, dependent on a shifting, living thing, few historic examples still exist. The tree house at Pitchford Hall in Shropshire, England, is one such exception. Considered the oldest in the Western world, it was likely built sometime in the 1600s and has been significantly reworked over the centuries, including the addition of steel reinforcements in the trunk. Its survival gives us a sense of how popular the tree house was in the early modern era, particularly as a garden folly.

But if royalty, ancient and Renaissance alike, couldn’t resist tree houses, then neither could adventurers. There was a particular revival in Europe in the 19th century, shortly after Johann David Wyss’s 1812–13 novel The Swiss Family Robinson was translated into numerous languages. Though the story changed from translation to translation, certain themes remained consistent and fascinated European audiences: A shipwrecked family is marooned on an island, where they work together and build a tree house.

Though the home is fictional, it is perhaps one of the most enduring Western tree houses, made so by Walt Disney. The studio adapted the novel in 1960 for the silver screen, and it was an instant hit, becoming one of the highest-grossing films of that year. The tree house of the movie was no humble structure but a sophisticated, multiroom abode and a bit of a Disney invention: In the original book, the family builds a tree house but abandons it after a short time when the mother falls, injuring herself. Two years later, capitalizing on the movie’s success, Disneyland opened the Swiss Family Treehouse attraction in a massive tree fabricated from steel and concrete. It was thrillingly re-created with Disney’s eye for detail: The Magic Kingdom iteration is made up of 300,000 fake leaves and incorporates living and artificial plants to duplicate the feel of its movie source. The result is a combination of fantasy and architecture that creates the feel of adventure with such hyperreality that it’s dizzying in effect.

Disney’s adaptations of the book loom large even now. Lifestyle influencer Alison Teal, who has more than two million followers on TikTok, calls her family the "real Swiss Family Robinson" and gives her followers tours of the tree house she lives in in Hawaii. Like her Disney predecessors, Teal lives there with her parents, who built it three decades ago. Her life is idyllic: She surfs, eats an endless bounty of homegrown fruit, and naps in a hammock. Teal lives in seemingly eternal sunshine. Her life is like a fantasy, uninterrupted by the demanding pace of modernity.

But that is part of the attraction: Nature is pristine, and the tree house pairs with it rather than destroys it. The reality is more complicated. As climate change and deforestation threaten, activists have adapted the tree house to protect its very foundation: the tree itself. American activist Julia Butterfly Hill made headlines in 1997 when she climbed a California redwood, eventually living in it for 738 days. Her tree house was practical and small, only two 1.8-by-1.8-meter platforms, built to protect the tree from the Pacific Lumber Company, which planned to cut down a large stretch of the woods where it was located. Hill descended from her tree house only when a deal was made to save it. She wasn’t the only tree sitter; activists in Germany lived in the Hambach forest for six years, building 60 tree houses to protect the forest from clearing. They were ultimately unsuccessful, removed in 2018 by police, the trees cut down for a coal mine.

Perhaps this is why the tree house plays an outsize role in childhood imagination: Both house and tree are free from conflict and allow an escape from adults. In nature, children are left to explore. The tree house prompts imagination, but it also encourages tinkering. In popular culture, a child’s tree house is closer to those of the activists than to the Swiss Family Robinson’s, built resourcefully with spare parts. In the 2007 film adaptation of Bridge to Terabithia, two children find an abandoned tree house in the forest that serves as an imaginative space where a fictional universe comes together. Bart Simpson escapes from his troubles in his tree house. In Dav Pilkey’s best-selling children’s books, his protagonists, two boys, pen their madcap, absurdist comics in a tree house (they even name their imprint Tree House Comix, Inc.). Even video games understand this interrelationship: In the wildly popular game Minecraft, users can customize and build their own.

But the humble and homemade tree house of fictional childhood is far from its current reality. In the opening of Animal Planet’s Treehouse Masters, host and builder Pete Nelson promises more: "The tree house just grew up," he says. Nelson’s structures are often behemoths, offering practically every amenity and comfort. Over 11 seasons, he has built tree houses with custom bathrooms, designer kitchens, and hot tubs—opulent structures that seem to defy the ephemeral nature of the living things that hold them.

"Nothing," Airbnb copy promises of its tree houses, "can disturb your peace."

The 21st-century iteration of the tree house is listed as a luxury category on both Vrbo and Airbnb. Vrbo describes its tree houses as "enchanting" and an "immersion in nature" without sacrifice. "Nothing," Airbnb copy promises of its tree houses, "can disturb your peace." There’s little of the rustic quality or adventurous spirit in the rental tree house and more a promise of lavish escapism designed for producing envy-inducing Instagram photos. The luxe tree house is part and parcel of the glamping trend, offering all of the inducements of nature with few of its drawbacks.

But in the middle of the Covid pandemic, the tree house also provided something more than a fancy getaway: It promised safety from the threat of infectious disease. High in the trees and often isolated, it underwent what the Associated Press described as a "renaissance." Rentals saw a boom, according to stats from Airbnb; in 2021, the company listed tree houses as the "most wish-listed" type of home, and in a trend report from 2022, it saw a 116 percent increase in interest. (It’s no surprise that Disney announced during the pandemic that it was rebooting Swiss Family Robinson, though that has yet to come to pass.) It was a new interpretation of a structure that inherently flirts with danger to suddenly offer security. As health concerns have subsided, tree houses remain popular: A luxurious one in Bali, Indonesia, was Airbnb’s most wish-listed rental in 2023.

The tree house renaissance shows no signs of tapering off, and its popularity seems likely to expand. As more and more such structures are built and travelers continue to seek them out, questions arise about their long-term sustainability. Their architecture is an intricate integration of nature and design, relying on the plentiful existence of healthy trees that have been allowed to grow for decades. But the trees themselves, as tree sitters persistently remind us, are under threat from climate change and overharvesting. Global forest area has seen a rapid decrease, and as of 2022, 25 countries had lost their forest cover entirely.

The history of the tree house is long and colorful; as a form of architecture, it endures because of its unique appeal. But because its foundation is alive and dependent on a flourishing environment, there is no promise that it will endure.

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