Tree-Net web

The client already had a zip wire when we first walked the garden. That told me something before he said a word. He wasn't going to ask for the obvious things - not a treehouse, not a rope bridge. He took us across the lawn to a particular oak, one of those rare ones where the main boughs lift out of the trunk in a wide cup-shape, as though the tree had grown itself a room. He wanted to sit up in there. With his children. With friends. He said it should be simple, natural, almost invisible from elsewhere in the garden.

That word - invisible - was the one I kept thinking about on the drive home. Most of what we do is, in some way, an object placed in a landscape. This was the opposite. The brief was to disappear into the canopy and leave the tree looking like the tree. Which meant no deck, no timber platform, no foundations of any kind. The whole thing had to live in the air, woven into the branches and held by them.

We made a true tree-web. Structural climbing rope and para-cord, knotted and lashed strand by strand, the team working in harnesses high in the crown for the better part of a week. There's no drawing for this kind of thing - not really. It's improvised in real time, against the geometry the tree gives you. While I was at my desk in Surrey on other projects, videos kept arriving from site: the lads up there between weaves, sitting like squirrels in the boughs, the lake glinting through the leaves behind them. His wish-list said "hang-out." He came back to us afterwards and said it was beyond what he'd imagined. I think that's because the tree did half the design, and we let it.