Fairytale treehouse

Two castles. That was the part I kept turning over after the first conversation ended, and it wasn't the towers themselves that held me. It was the gap. Not one treehouse with a couple of rooms in it, but two structures standing apart in a family garden with a rope bridge between them. A father wanted somewhere his two daughters could vanish into. You need a place to leave from and a place to arrive at, otherwise you've built a room up a tree and called it an adventure. The cedar tiles are what most people see first, laid across both roofs until the whole thing reads as something out of a book rather than something out of a catalogue. One material decision doing most of the storytelling. I'd rather that than a dozen decorative ones fighting each other.

Here's the question a parent should ask before commissioning anything like this: will they actually use it, or will it sit there looking lovely? Fair question. Beautiful structures get admired and then abandoned. So the castles are only half the job. There's a zip wire, a scramble net, high decks and the bridge, which gets more traffic than any of it. Solar lighting comes on at dusk and the garden stays open a bit longer.

What the girls do up there isn't really ours to direct. Princesses one week. Something entirely different the next. We built the setting, and they keep rewriting what happens inside it. Most wish-lists arrive the same way - a parent describing a feeling they had when they were seven, rather than a structure they want. I wonder if that's the only honest place to start…