Hanging treehouse

The photographs make it look calm. Two weeks on the Côte d'Azur, and a good part of that was spent hanging off a rope, harnessed in, working one-handed seven metres above the ground. You can't lift deck boards into a canopy from a ladder. So we went up and stayed up there, and the trees decided most of what happened next.

What the family asked for, at the start, was an adventure in the trees. That was about the size of it. Not a room on legs with a ladder bolted to the side - which is what most people picture when they say treehouse, and fair enough, that is what most of them are. Seven metres does something else entirely. At that height you stop looking down into your own garden and start looking out, towards the mountains one way and the ocean the other. The view stops being a bonus. It becomes the reason for the climb. The wish-list grew from there: two trees, decks cascading around them, timber steps lifting you level by level, a walkway out across the canopy, then a slide for the quick way down.

Here is the part I still find interesting. The decks don't all work the same way. Some sit on poles, solid and still. Others hang free from the trees, so they shift a little when the canopy shifts - which is the whole point, and also the thing that takes longest to get right. A practical note, since people do ask about building abroad: the timber came down from the UK by lorry, and we brought the rest across Europe ourselves on the trailer.

Calling it a treehouse undersells it slightly. It's more of a route. One deck leads to another, the steps change your level, the walkway carries on when you expected it to stop. I wonder whether that's the real test with any of these - whether anyone climbs it twice, on an ordinary Tuesday, with nobody watching…