Wrap-around treehouse

Most enquiries about a treehouse arrive with a worry attached, and in Sussex the worry was a beech. Mature, broad, standing near the centre of the garden and quietly responsible for most of what makes that ground feel like somewhere. The family's question was whether building in it would mean losing sight of it. Reasonable thing to ask. The usual answer in our trade is a box up in the branches, and a box tends to swallow a trunk.

So we went outwards rather than simply up. The treehouse wraps around the beech and the decks fall away from it in steps, which keeps the eye travelling back to the tree instead of stopping at the building. The tree ended up looking bigger. Not literally - though it will be, in time, which is part of the thinking. A living beech moves in wind and thickens every year, so the structure has to leave room for both, and how much room is a decision made standing under it rather than on a drawing months earlier. There were two briefs to reconcile here as well. Mum and Dad wanted somewhere to sit out in the afternoon sun. The children wanted to get off the ground and stay off it.

The cascading decks handle that second job. They climb. A child goes up through them, finds the scramble net, finds the slide, then steps out onto a treetop walkway that crosses the whole garden - so the treehouse stops being a destination and turns into a departure point. From below you watch them pass over your head, which is an odd and rather good feeling for a parent. Come evening, low light comes through the beech and catches the decks.

Their wish-list never used the word aerial. It said something closer to: make the tree the best thing here, and let the children move like birds. The first half we could draw. The second half only made sense once someone small was up there doing it.