Real Life Tree Houses: Background information when reading Harry's Trees

Real Life Tree Houses

This article relates to Harry's Trees

Unlike Harry in Jon Cohen's Harry's Trees, readers can't stay in the fictional tree house built by Amanda Jeffers's late husband, but there are plenty of other wildly inventive and beautiful tree houses around the world that people can visit, explore - and even sleep in! Here are just a few:

Just 20 miles outside Seattle, in Fall City, Washington, is Treehouse Point, an eco-resort with a mini-village of six unique tree houses deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. The resort's owner is a tree house consultant who also teaches courses on how to build them.

The TreeHotel in Sweden takes a modern approach to tree house construction, with tree houses that resemble a mirrored cube, a floating box, a bird's nest and even a UFO.

You can't sleep over (too bad!), but the Wild Walk near Lake Placid in New York offers visitors a trail of bridges and platforms that travel across, and in some cases, through, the trees in the Adirondack forest canopy. With an enormous spider's web and bird's nest, plus a massive tree house, the Wild Walk is also accessible to visitors in wheelchairs.

In Costa Rica, you can really get a bird's eye view of nature at Nature Observatorio, which offers an immersive experience in a wildlife refuge, complete with being hoisted 80 feet in the air in a harness to a treetop home outfitted with hammocks. Meals are delivered by basket!

And if money is no object, you can sleep in a tree house in the middle of a volcano in Rwanda. Bisate Lodge offers eco-conscious villas crafted from local materials, complete with views not only of the surrounding mountains but of the mountain gorillas that live there.

Filed under Cultural Curiosities

This "beyond the book article" relates to Harry's Trees. It originally ran in August 2018 and has been updated for the June 2019 paperback edition. Go to magazine.