This tree house is nicer than most homes

Hi there, welcome to my channel where I take you on tours of one-of-a-kind homes and creative spaces. In today's episode we're visiting a spectacular home that's nestled high up in the trees. Created as an inspiring spot for artists to use during residency, this gorgeous tree house features a mid-century modern design that is built to adapt and highlight the spectacular trees that hold it up. We're going to take a tour and learn what it's like to build a permitted tree house and why it's important for the owners to share this space with others. But before we get started, if you like videos like this, make sure that you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you know every single time we publish a new tour. I'm Shawn Landis, this is Bodie. I'm Jodi Rockwell and this is the Black Crane Tree House. We're in Bremerton, Washington on Mission Lake. We got the property to host artists and residents here so they stay for three weeks for free and get to make their work and they have studios and live-work spaces and that's why we're doing all of this. The area appealed to us because its location west of Seattle. Taking a ferry to come here, especially an hour-long ferry, helps you get into the mindset of leaving the city. The land is originally Suquamish land. The property itself faces west so we get to see the Olympic Mountains. I'm a contractor so I know how to fix many of the things and build things and design things. I like to try to figure out what's the most and the biggest thing I'm capable of doing. I believe the draw to create a tree house was to be able to design something that was small yet beautiful. I think that the thing that draws people to tree houses is just this innate sense of safety. Since we're monkeys, we came from the trees and once we get up into the trees climbing as a kid or whatever, there's just a kind of like a calming effect and a safety in that space. It can absorb any level of stress and it takes it away and I think it has that impact on a lot of people that come here that it's a place that feels bigger than us. When you build something like a tree house, you have to do a lot of due diligence to make sure that that project is viable. The building department here was super supportive and they definitely made me respond to some issues in the design and the engineering. There's geotech to do and development and runoff and we jumped through those hoops but like the whole process was really smooth. From the time we started the actual construction, the tree house took about 10 months to build. How much did it cost? Everything we had, everything we have and everything we're gonna have. So this tree house, the top elevation is limited by the building code height which is 35 feet and so I'm a little bit under that. I suppose I'm a fan of mid-century modern architecture. When I started to visualize what a tree house could be, I definitely wanted to go outside of what any kind of norm was. This tree house is constructed with three legs basically. It has these two trees that are roughly 100 years old that holds up one section of the tree house and then to appease the building code people, and I like it, it's a good idea, they said you know how trees are going to act in a seismic event and I can totally appreciate that. At the same time, I was kind of heartbroken that I had to put a tower up through the middle but healed the broken heart and moved on. Turns out I really like that. I had a great engineer. I was part of the development of this. It's these special bolts that are specially designed for high load capacities that go into the tree and that's called a GL gagne limb. You have to get that load into the tree so there's this giant boss and then this thing goes into the tree maybe like eight to nine inches. So there's 16 of these GLs on this whole project. 16 of these and I think they're rated for 5,000 pounds a piece. I think it's around 80,000 pounds of force that can be loaded down on this. The tree house is 100% stable. The tower in the middle comes down to these concrete legs and then down below are these just enormous concrete footings. I call them coffin forms because they're just huge and you just dump concrete, dump concrete. The tree house itself does not move but when it is windy the trees will sway and when they're swaying they need to be able to move so these attachments are all designed to allow that motion, whatever it is, to stay dynamic. So there's dynamic connections and stagnant connections. So some slide around depending on what's happening with the tree and then some stay pretty fixed. The trees grow out of the top of the tree rather than out of the base. So this height that you see here, if we came back in 100 years and the tree's alive and everything, that height will be the same off of the ground. This won't move and that's really important. But trees do grow in diameter and as they grow in diameter they'll start to swallow up this hardware. Across time as this gets swallowed up I need to come out and like adjust these things so that this hardware doesn't swallow up. This tree house is designed to last for 80 years before serious reconstruction of the floor and the walls have to happen to allow the trees to move and continue to grow. Working and living in the northwest you can never never have too much outdoor covered space. I love the feeling of being underneath of this roof on a deck and when the rain is just like blasting down and you're not getting rained on and you're sort of protected. I like that feeling. The view is is beautiful. It's rare to be on a lake and have a view of mountains. Most of the time the lakes are you're kind of down in a in a lower zone and you can't you wouldn't be able to see out. So it's pretty unique to have this arrangement. When I'm designing I'm thinking about how do you bring in natural light to the space and be able to flood it with light and so adding the skylights is a lot of extra natural effect. At this end of the porch is an aperture and I believe that in good design the design should draw you through spaces and one way to help draw people through spaces is to put a light on the opposing side. When you come around the corner down here you come down this cannon the aperture is supposed to draw you across. You are welcome to enter the treehouse. One thing that I like to play with in my design choices is symmetry in some cases and then asymmetry in other cases. So if the arborist is correct and I'm sure she is, I think that the tree is supposed to grow like an inch per decade something like that. I designed this treehouse to grow kind of like 12 inches in diameter before it needs to be disassembled. The diameter of that window is what I speculate the size of that tree will be when it's time to disassemble the structure. It's kind of like foreshadowing something. So this is one of the two trees of the treehouse. I love having it as the kind of center point of the design and working around it. I love this tree. It's very difficult to seal a tree that goes through a treehouse. I will never put a tree through the middle of the treehouse and the problem is this is the southern tree and it just gets so soaked and it's got this buried surface and then the water just comes down the trunk which it doesn't bother me in the space it's just that it kind of sometimes leaks around and gets out. So it is definitely a work in progress and I'm hoping to figure it out as I go along and this is an especially big challenge. I don't think any treehouse builders have totally nailed this yet. I love plywood way better than sheetrock. I think the effect is much more profound with the plywood. Once you're inside this building if you can imagine it like you could feel like you're inside of a tree because there's just plywood all around you so you like maybe you can imagine what it might feel like to be a tree for a moment. I think the kitchen is a great example of working through the design process while you're building. This corner I had everything laid out and designed in this building. This space was like potentially going to be like a wood stove and then like a couple of chairs. The week I needed to make the choice about okay what the hell we're going to do over here how's this going to look I can do like a banquette and then a bigger table and then we can get like 12 people around this table. You get so much more out of this space than what I had conceived or could I imagine while I was first starting. This is what I would call like a kitchenette plus. You have a giant sink. We built custom cabinetry underneath of it and it's got deep sinks it's maybe it's a little bit excessive but it's the thing that does the thing. This is designed to be a drain rack and a storage rack so you can wash dishes and then when you're done washing you just put it up here instead of on the drain table and then put it away later. On this property I have a pottery studio and make ceramics. I do a lot of functional work that's designed for the treehouse specifically but the whole kitchen is outfitted with my ceramics. The black glaze goes with the exterior of the treehouse and a lot of the black accents throughout the interior. The mugs themselves were designed to have it's called a black horizon line. No matter what piece is next to the other one the line remains the same across and I think people get pretty excited to be able to use handmade stuff. So much about what we both do is very thoughtful considering how we connect with people and to have something that I made with my hands that someone else is holding there's a direct connection there. It's hard for me to not think about the people who made the art that's around the treehouse as well and there are a lot of pieces in there that mean a lot to us and we share that with the renters. It's a very authentic experience to be connected to the artists in a house with real meaning. These cabinets are custom-built cabinets. My friend Arnie Peel built them and he came out to the property while we were building the treehouse and he did an amazing job. It works out really great because the heavy grain of oak I think looks really good with this stain. Really nice burners nice and big and very like well detailed and then we do an under cabinet fridge. When people use this kitchen I want them to enjoy it and focus on what they're cooking and try to be like simple but good quality. There's an idea that has the bed at the center point of the whole space. It's a small space with a king bed in it and I think that really like kind of brings the focus. The design of this is here because right above the bed is the biggest skylight on the treehouse. Maybe 30 inches by five feet or four feet. From the bed looking up you're looking up through the center of the canopy of the two trees. I love looking at tree branches. It's some self-soothing activity that I did. I remember doing it as a kid and it is really relaxing. This is the bathroom with the robot toilet. These bidet toilets once you've used one it's an experience. What I'm most interested in is kind of like creating more textures within these modern spaces and that high contrast between like something big fat and textural against like hard lines and you know smooth finishes. I am in love with an open shower plan. Shower doors and curtains and all that stuff is like stuff that just gets grimy and gross so I prefer this kind of open floor plan. It's a big fat shower head and basically the water kind of like falls like rain. I kind of figured that there's about a five foot radius from the center of the water falling and I think it functions super well with an open floor plan. Skylight above the shower head it creates a nice kind of like round shape and square shape that go together and you kind of get the light coming through there which is always nice. Heated floor as well which it's cool. Not very easy to do but it's kind of nice to walk in there. So this is the mini split heat system. I think these are the ugliest thing and so I really tried to hide it the best I can but within that ugliness is an incredible amount of efficiency and so these things use hardly any electricity to create the heat that's needed to warm the space. It's a very well insulated space so once this gets the space up to temperature it does not have to work very hard to keep it going. So the other part of this space it's like the little tiny cove of a private space that's not really private. It's the writing desk. Every good space needs to have a work surface of some nature I would always want people to feel reconnected with themselves to be able to be at this property with some alone time even when there's a lot of people around so you can have togetherness and you can also go find yourself some time alone to reconnect with yourself. Our model of running the artist residency we are both artists. We believe that artist to artist sharing is like a really effective way of supporting other artists. The big game plan behind the treehouse and behind the property is how do we get more people feeling comfortable and confident and driven towards their creative endeavors. Thanks for watching this week's video. If you'd like to see more treehouse tours make sure you check out the playlist we have linked in the description and I will see you soon with another unique home tour.