"By the time I erected the third temporary scaffolding 25 feet above the ground, I was building platforms with confidence." -Excerpt from "Treehouse" by Peter Heer.
To read more from this imaginative book Click here

Buy the book "Treehouse - For Everyone Who Ever Dreamed"
189 pages of stories photos and illustrations about the building and living in this treehouse.

Also included: the DVD "Earth Poetry" the 25 min. award winning film of life in and around this treehouse.

Christmas in Vermont .Welcome to the magic world of my tree house! I was asked many questions about this creation when I first built it. The funniest was how did I get the house up in this tree? It's a long story but the short story is that I moved to Vermont from NYC and took the summer off after getting married. I at first lived in a beautiful valley until it started getting hot and the cows in the pasture started invading my tee-pee. Then we moved into the woods where it was cooler. I set up a camp on the edge of a cliff with large granite out cropping. Here we lived all summer while I began building a home with a very limited budget. How can you build a architecturally significant house for $750.00 ? Simple, Build it in a tree!

The following are some of the views of the house that took two summers to complete.

This is the place where dreams start.

The difference between the next two shots is one year. The first shot is in the late fall just after I had closed up the structure for the winter. I wasn't able to compete the under side of the structure until the following summer so had to leave the scaffolding in place for a winter. Note that these few boards sticking out were the only scaffolding I used to build the entire outside of the house.

These are the steps to the house. I started the project by making the first set of steps in the shop out of 2X6 that I purchased from my neighbor who ran a one man saw mill. All the lumber was green and full dimensioned which made it strong and not prone to cracking when you drove a nail in it. This allowed me to use 20 pound ribbed nails that would spit water at you as you drove them. The water made the lumber very heavy to handle up in the air, but as the wood dried out it shrank around all the nails making it impossible to get the nails out later. This made for a very strong structure aside from all the triangulation within the design. These steps were notched and pegged, however, and no glue or nails were used. The hardwood pegs were kiln-dried so they did not shrink as the wood did around them. The fit was tight and they never loosened up in the years that I lived in this house. The stair run is ten feet with one foot for each step. Note my dog Teddy at the foot of the steps. He often was there or would hang out on the first landing at the top of this step run.

I used to sit here at my desk and read or shoot film. There are some fabulous shots of the snow coming down from this view above the tree tops. I also shot some time lapse of the clouds. The most beautiful shots were the fall leaves as the rich color laden foliage dripped like the colors off a pallet!

This shows my living room table. It was the remainder of the third fork of the tree that I discovered was dead from this point up. The small branch is alive.

If you would like to have a 30 minute film shot of and around the tree house, please go to the "I want it "page and order it. It is very aesthetic and beautiful and took ten years to complete. It was shot in 16mm and is available on VHS.