Adventure treehouse

Most garden treehouses are one platform with a ladder. A single place to be. You climb up, you arrive, and somewhere around the second summer the children stop bothering.

Cobham gave us three trees.

That changes the arithmetic. With three trees you stop designing a structure and start designing routes - how a child gets from here to there, and whether the getting there might be better than the arriving. It usually is. The family, on a private property in Cobham, Surrey, wanted something groundbreaking for their children: exciting, different, somewhere to climb and cross and swing amongst the trees rather than underneath them. Their wish-list grew as we talked. Four rope bridges. Suspended bridges, treetop walkways, hanging platforms, a climbing wall, a nest swing, timber decks at several levels and a suspended hanging tree deck for the quieter half of an afternoon. The harder part of the brief was longevity. Parents ask us this constantly, usually sideways - will they still want it in five years? The honest answer is that a treehouse only stays interesting if it holds more than a child can use at once. So the difficulty sits at different heights. A crossing that feels serious at six becomes a shortcut later, and by then the climbing wall, or the far walkway, is the thing worth doing. Nobody finishes it.

There's a solar panel feeding the lighting, which sounds like a footnote and isn't. It keeps the canopy in use after the light has gone from the garden.

The family were mesmerised. Their word, and I'd sooner report it than dress it up. Three ordinary trees standing in a Surrey garden, doing what they'd always done - and now the children have somewhere to go.