Client: Artistree Home

Overview

Merging luxury hospitality with regenerative design, this Artistree’s Spyglass™ is a beautiful treehouse nestled in a redwood forest. Part of Artistree’s signature prefab units, Spyglass can be attached to trees or stilted off the ground. Either way, like old-fashioned spyglasses used to magnify what is in the distance, this 450 square foot treehouse brings the outside up close with its round spherical design and open window looking out into the forest—highlighting nature as an art form. From rounded walls to a shower with a view, it’s truly unique and stands apart from other hospitality units, combining luxury with immersion in nature.

Spyglass’ alder wood paneling inside the circular walls creates soft, clean lines. The exterior diamond-shaped metal tiles provide a custom fascia wrap that mimics bark, helping Spyglass blend seamlessly with the forest. While out of view, Artistree also curated other building materials like Hempicture’s hemp wool batt insulation (a carbon negative/sequestering technology), an electric heat pump to keep energy use to a minimum, an energy-recovery ventilator (ERV) to maximize fresh air in the space and minimize the need for heating/cooling, and low-flow plumbing fixtures, all easy on the environment now and during the life of the Spyglass.

Goals

Artistree®’s Spyglass™ is a one-of-a-kind experience seamlessly offering guests both the wild adventure of sleeping in a redwood tree and unexpected artistic beauty and creature comforts. Floor-to-ceiling windows in the circular structure offer breathtaking panoramic views of the lush forest canopy, creating nature as artwork and drawing people outside. This natural element is complemented by a harmonious blend of reclaimed wood, bespoke built-ins, and more natural elements like a hand-carved stone bathroom sink.  Building in a living tree is always an artistic and innovative project as every tree species and each individual tree is unique.

For this project, Artistree's objectives were to create a luxury hospitality offering that would give guests an amazing experience and spotlight the surrounding redwood forest. Artistree's canvas is nature, a dynamic relationship with place that differs from bulldozing to creating a flat build site and pouring a concrete slab foundation. Everything we do has to work with the land, not conquer it. Spyglass' round design provides a luxurious seamless interior and plays with Artistree's favorite biomimicry element of round/smooth rather than rectangular /90-degree angled structures.

Process

With the Spyglass at Hometree, we collaborated with RBHU's engineering team to create the first permitted treehouse in Sonoma County (and possibly all of California) that is structurally supported by a living tree.  Collaboratively, we designed a combination of steel support "legs" that would pin the structure to the cliff as well as tree supports that suspended the back deck from a large redwood tree.  The balance was between making the unit structural sound and minimizing the visual impact of the steel supports.  To add another artistic moment, Artistree and RBHU designed a way to suspend a cedar hot tub right in the middle of the back deck directly under the tree.

Our team of craftsmen carefully constructed the structure's unique shape with a combination of mechanically routed elements for structural precision and meticulously hand-crafted details that would make the guest experience special.  Our team was often suspended from ropes, constructing in mid-air to suspend the structure off a cliff and attach it to the redwood tree.  The process becomes a dance between carpentry, welding, and art! Innovation in design and then later at the building site is critical to successfully completing these projects, and we have amazing teams in both areas.

Additional Information

The Spyglass mobile residency is constructed from plywood and steel circular ribs that create the home's looking glass shape. The ribs provide the structural support for the walls and roof and stabilize the structure for wind and seismic events. The tiny home was prefabricated and designed to travel on steel beams attached to a steel chassis. In its current home, the structure rests 35-feet above ground on a steel braced-frame base that lifts the home into the tree canopy.