Infinity treehouse

We were standing at the end of a garden in Bookham, in Surrey, looking at a hill that fell away towards the woodland, and for a while the conversation stopped being about a treehouse at all. Most people picture one at the bottom of the garden. You see it from the kitchen window. You know where it is and roughly what it will feel like before you ever walk down to it. On that slope, that seemed like a waste of what the land was already doing. So we asked a different question. What if you couldn't see it?

That became the Infinity Treehouse. From the house the only thing visible is a rope bridge heading into the trees, and then it goes over the ridge line and is gone. You have to cross it to find out where it ends. The treehouse sits below the bridge, deliberately - that is the whole mechanism of the thing. Move past the ridge and the ground drops beneath you, and the structure that was hidden a moment ago is now standing about four metres in the air. Cascading wooden decks open out around it, following the changing levels of the site rather than arguing with them.

I should say something practical here. The height was never a design intention. The land produced it. Had we levelled that section, or chosen a flatter corner nearer the house, the sequence would have folded into an ordinary garden building. Clients usually arrive with a wish-list that starts with the object: timber, platform, ladder, rope. This one started with a walk. House, bridge, ridge, drop, decks - the order is the architecture. Whether you call the result a treehouse or a route into your own woodland, I'm not sure it matters... though I suspect the second one lasts longer. What would your garden hide, given the chance?