Living the Dream: Hand-Crafted Treehouse Home + Skate Park
The urge to leave the ground and live among the trees has stricken many of us, and a lucky few get to live out that dream. Small-living enthusiast and author Foster Huntingdon is living out his dreams among the wooded mountains of Skamania, Washington.
Huntingdon - blogger, photographer, and author of Home is Where You Park It - lived in a roving trailer for three years before packing it in and building his stationary home on a plot of his family's land. He calls it the Cinder Cone, a term that means "a steep conical hill of tephra (volcanic debris) that accumulates around and downwind from a volcanic vent."
As you can tell, this is no ordinary home. This is two tiny buildings and an observation platform all suspended off of the ground on three tall Douglas Fir Trees. Each tree is connected via foot bridges that allow for easy movement between them.
Both of the buildings are a scant 220 square feet; one is Huntingdon's personal home and the other is a guest house. And he won't have any shortage of guests - his friends and family pitched in to help him bring his dream to life so will no doubt spend plenty of time enjoying it with him.
On the ground, several hot tubs dot the landscape around the treehouses. But the home's most unique feature has to be the impressive skatebowl dug out of the hill and finished with reinforced concrete. Making this lifelong dream come true didn't come cheaply - Huntingdon estimates the project's cost at somewhere around $170,000 - but if we had the money and resources to build something this grand and impressive, we'd do it in a heartbeat.
