We’ll Never Climb Down From the Tree House

One of the earliest surviving accounts of tree houses comes from, of all people, first-century philosopher Pliny the Elder. In his Natural History, published around 77 to 79, Pliny recounts a story about the Roman emperor Caligula, who appreciated the bounty of nature despite his tyrannical reputation. Pliny writes that Caligula was so "impressed" by a large plane tree that he had "benches laid loosely on beams consisting of its branches" within and held a banquet, calling it his "nest." Though Pliny’s story is only a few sentences in an expansive text, it neatly summarizes the lingering fascination with the tree house: It marries the sublimity of the natural world with architecture. Caligula was so struck by the plane tree that he didn’t just want to observe it; he wanted to inhabit it.

He isn’t the only one enchanted by the idea. In his account, Pliny also describes a contemporary tree house built in a hollow trunk, suggesting the foliage of the tree was more delightful than the princely decor of marble, painted decorations, tapestries, and gilded paneling. These early accounts resonate even in the 21st century, as tree houses continue to occupy our imagination (and our trees). They offer a respite from civilization, immersion in nature, and an architectural otherness that sparks the imagination all with the thrill of some risk. And the mesh of feelings Pliny identified continues to follow the tree house, nearly 2,000 years later.

The tree house was not just a Roman curiosity; references to it appear in Renaissance texts, most famously two that belonged to the powerful Florentine Medicis. Stefano della Bella’s etching of the tree house at the family’s Villa di Pratolino features stairs that wrap around a massive tree, all man-made elements rendered nearly invisible by all the foliage. Another Medici tree house, in Castello (designed by Niccolò Tribolo), the artist, architect, and writer Giorgio Vasari noted, had an invisible pipe system that carried water "along the branches of this tree, to sprinkle people and to make fearful hissing sounds."

Since the tree house is by its very nature ephemeral, dependent on a shifting, living thing, few historic examples still exist. The tree house at Pitchford Hall in Shropshire, England, is one such exception. Considered the oldest in the Western world, it was likely built sometime in the 1600s and has been significantly reworked over the centuries, including the addition of steel reinforcements in the trunk. Its survival gives us a sense of how popular the tree house was in the early modern era, particularly as a garden folly.