How To Build A Swedish Treehouse

It just may be heaven on Earth.

Treehotel, a collection of creatively designed treehouses-turned-hotel-rooms, is located amid lush greenery in the Swedish village of Harads. Designed to provide treetop refuge to those looking for atypical ways to travel, the hotel offers a host of ground-level activities as well: sledding and snowshoeing in the winter, tours of the forest on horseback in the summer (waffles with cloudberries and cream included). Heavenly, indeed.

Founders Kent and Britta Lindvall, who found inspiration for the project in a film called The Tree Lover, opened for business in 2010. Today, there are 6 rooms total, each executed by a different team of architects, and each with its own unique design concept. (There’s a bird’s nest, for starters. A UFO. A dragonfly with rusted steel wings.)

A dozen odd feet off the forest floor, guests enjoy nature with new eyes – and for many, a stay in a treehouse fulfills numberless childhood daydreams. Overall, Lindvall says, “the experience is one of quietness and tranquility.”

The architects, for the most part, were given creative freedom, so long as the rooms they constructed did no harm to the trees or the surrounding environment, and could operate year-round. Eco-conscious design was key: LED lighting, hydroelectric power, and combustion toilets are features in each structure.

As might be expected, the projects presented challenges, raised questions, stretched creative boundaries.

Here, taking us behind the blueprints, six Treehotel architects elaborate.

THE BIRD’S NEST

It makes perfect sense: if you’re going to attempt to build a bird’s nest fit for a (human) family of 4, you’re going to have to think like a bird. Such was the reasoning of architect Bertil Harström, whose Bird’s Nest treehouse boasts a sleek wooden interior with sliding doors and 2 separate bedrooms. “I constructed the façade using branches from the local surroundings – just like the birds do. The branches had either fallen naturally or were from felling areas.” He continues, “I had seen a huge bird’s nest belonging to Steller’s sea eagles – the biggest eagles in the world – on a fishing trip. So I knew that really big nests existed.”

To build his nest, Harström used wood with adjustable iron fittings to construct a base structure that would accommodate the natural growth of the surrounding trees. Branches were then fastened to a network of iron bars. The crowning touch? Remote-controlled stairs. To maintain the bird’s nest illusion, “[the entrance] had to be invisible,” says Harström.

(Above: step one of the treehouse's genesis. Below: the final result.)

The effect: near-complete camouflage. “The interior walls are clad with wood panels and the windows almost disappear in the branches,” the architect says.

THE UFO

A branch-festooned birds’ nest now under his belt, Harström- charged with the task of creating a second structure - decided to go down a decidedly different path. “What would be the most unusual thing to find in the forest?” he wondered.

Evidently, the answer was a UFO – or, in this case, a treehouse designed to look like one: a colossal silver clamshell, complete with portholes and a retractable staircase. Built using a composite material coated in metallic paint, Harströmselected what he refers to as “unusual materials and colors” for the spacecraft’s interior and exterior. “I chose strangely colored plastic Bolon carpets; bamboo panels. The structure was built like a boat in a plastic material. Since a UFO is something that isn’t from Earth, we had no problem with the building materials coming from space.”

THE MIRRORCUBE

The brainchild of architects Bolle Tham and Martin Videgård,Treehotel’s much talked-about Mirrorcube is a masterpiece of illusion – one whose every detail was painstakingly considered. In order to construct the symmetrical structure, the pair began with a lightweight aluminum frame.Twelve panes of mirrored glass followed, each treated with infrared film to prevent birds from mistaking reflected trees for the real thing.

“The reflective glass mirrors the surroundings and the sky, creating a camouflaged place among the treetops,” says Videgård. “It blends into the landscape and doesn’t interfere with nature. The panes are fixed with no visible joints, and are mounted using only engineered tape - the same way you manufacture airplanes nowadays.”

“The Mirrorcube works as a light machine, changing character as time passes,” Tham continues. “It goes from a light-reflecting obscure object during the day, to a glowing refuge at night.”

THE BLUE CONE

The least treehouse-like of the lot, The Blue Cone - sheathed in cardinal red birch - rests on a sturdy wooden foundation and is accessible by bridge, making it an apt choice for guests in wheelchairs. Designed by Thomas Sandell of Stockholm’s sandellsanderg, the structure marries traditional woodwork with modern, minimal interior design.

As for its puzzling name, Sandell explains, “I remembered a story when Stockholm’s City Hall was built. The main hall was meant to be blue, but the architect Ragnar Östbergchanged his mind and built it using red bricks. However, it’s still called the Blue Hall.” Humorous anecdotes aside, the choice of color was one made mindfully. “I like the strong graphical impact of a bright red house in the snow,” he says.

THE CABIN

“In Swedish, a kabin is a vessel that people sit in when they go up the Alps along a cableway,” says architect Mårten Cyrén, who designed Treehotel’s Cabin room with his brother and business partner, Gustav. “The word doesn’t have the same meaning in English, but we kept the name anyway for its connection to nature, the wilderness, and ‘the simple life’. Ultimately, we ended up with something that resembles a VW camper bus.”

It took 4 days to mount the 6-ton structure, made completely of plywood, between four large pine trees on laminated wooden beams. “The Cabin, which was already constructed in a factory, was lifted into place with a crane. It was fixed with long bolts through the beams and into the roof; thus, it hangs beneath the beams,” Cyrénexplains. “This allowed us to place a terrace on the roof, where the entrance door is. You go down into the room via an internal staircase.”

Lastly, a steel bridge, over eighty feet long, was installed to provide access. “Originally, the idea was to make it completely horizontal, but it leans a bit up to the terrace and the entrance. I think this works even better. At the beginning of the bridge you don’t really see the Cabin – only the bridge and a door at the end. It’s a bit like a magic trick.”

“We felt uneasy about putting architecture up in the trees, but it was quite liberating,” says Cyrén, whose favorite feature of the Cabin is its sweeping view of the Lule River. “It moves a little when it’s windy – it’s quite nice.”

DRAGONFLY

The construction of the Dragonfly – the largest of Treehotel’s six rooms - presented Sami Rintala of Rintala Eggertsson Architects with a unique challenge: balancing twenty-two metric tons of wood and steel between 6 towering (albeit somewhat spindly-looking) pines and spruces. “In the beginning, I was skeptical about using living trees as support,” he says. “But I was shown studies from Lund University proving not only that the load-bearing capacity of a tree is much better than sawn timber, but also that there are ways to connect to the trees that do not harm their growth.”

“The construction is not an illusion of suspension, but the opposite,” Rintala explains. “It clearly shows what is carrying what. There are three beams, each attached to two trees,and from these beams, the whole building hangs – like a wooden Pinocchio in a puppet theater.”

The Dragonfly’s exterior is Cor-Ten steel, a material meant to rust over time. “The color of the rust is very close to the color of the pine trees,” says Rintala. “It’s very beautiful, especially in the middle of winter, in low sunshine.” As for the building’s namesake, he says, the design was inspired by both manner and form:  “A dragonfly has the ability to fly still, fixed to one spot in the air. Then it moves quickly and, again, stays still, observing.”

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Treehotel

960 24 Harads, Sweden

Tel +46 92810403

info@treehotel.se

www.treehotel.se

All images courtesy of the Treehotel.

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