Aerial treehouse

The detail I keep coming back to on this Hascombe build is the trolley.

A zip wire crossing a garden at four metres is a proper piece of engineering — span, height, load, the lot. But the thing that decides whether a family actually uses it is smaller and much less glamorous. Someone has to walk back up and fetch the trolley. Do that a dozen times on a Saturday and the wire stops being fun and starts being a chore. So we put in a mechanised pulley return. The trolley comes back on its own. The next child is already climbing into the aerial treehouse before the last one has stopped grinning.

The wish-list, when it arrived, asked for adventure and exploration — something with enough in it for children, without making the adults spectators standing about in the grass. Hascombe gave us a woodland garden that catches the sunset. That view is worth building towards. We set the treehouse about two and a half metres up, on poles, so you read the garden from inside the trees rather than beside them. Then the slower half: outdoor decks, a hanging nest swing and a hanging deck platform, which sounds like the simple bit and isn't. Getting a suspended platform to sit level, stay level and carry what it needs to carry is aerial engineering, quietly done. Most of the work here is invisible by design. Prepared in our Surrey workshop, then built into the garden it was drawn for — not a catalogue structure dropped onto a lawn.

What the family got, I think, is a reason to go outside without a plan. Some days that means a heart rate. Other days it means sitting above your own garden with a drink, watching the light go, while somebody else takes the wire.

We build these to last decades. That matters more when both generations are using it.