Knack Treehouses:  A Step-By-Step Guide To Designing & Building A Safe & Sound Structure, text & principal photography by Lon Levin, treehouse construction and technical review by Dan Wright

Sometimes it can be fascinating to see what kind of agenda that people have when it comes to talking about various construction.  There are a variety of people for whom a treehouse might be appealing, and this book does a good job in revealing just how broad of a coalition of treehouse enthusiasts that the authors are aiming at here.  Appealing to those seeking to build for children or for themselves as children at heart would seem to be an obvious appeal and there is certainly a lot of that.  But there were definitely plenty of surprises about who this book seeks to appeal to, including a lot of people who seek to build elaborate treehouses that are more luxuriant than most houses and a lot of attempts to appeal to those interested in environmental sustainability while also building treehouses.  This was shown, for example, by the author talking about spherical treehouses as well as plenty of found-object treehouses, some of them quite large, that seek to use wood and other products for building treehouses while also reducing the amount of waste present.

This particular book is more than 200 pages long and is divided into 20 chapters worth of material, many of which have photos and illustrations galore.  After a short introduction the book begins properly with a discussion about treehouse dreams (1) and the various types of styles of treehouse that one can build (2).  There is a discussion of rustic treehouses (3) and also about such matters as tree selection (4) and the planning (5) of one’s construction work.  The author deals intelligently with the platforms and supports (6) required for treehouses as well as access (7), windows and doors (8), roofs (9), and fun features (10).  There is a discussion of tools (11), hardware (12), and materials (13) as well as what is needed for support construction (14) and platform building (15).  After this the author systematically moves to discuss framing and walls (16) and roofing (17), before discussing how to construct access to the treehouse (18) as well as some additional options, including doors, windows, electricity, furniture, and accessories (19) as well as including some resources for people to read for further information.  The book then concludes with some photo credits and an index, which makes sense given that this book has a lot of photos, including several cases where the same houses are looked at multiple times for different elements.

And if building a treehouse is not something I intend on doing anytime soon, this book was enjoyable to read.  It was clear to me that this book was aiming at an audience that could consider treehouses an environmental statement, and even if that is not something that means very much as a means to appeal to me, I have to say that some of those environmentally friendly arboreal structures look pretty amazing and would probably be very fun to build as well as live in.  Whether one is building a fortress for children to use as a means of aiding their skills at fantasy or one is seeking to build a luxury home for adults who perhaps have not entirely grown up there is certainly a lot here that is worthy of interest.  And the author is pretty thorough here in discussing the elements of a successful treehouse–there is a lot of technical advice here that is very helpful to those who want to build a treehouse correctly and also pay attention to the well-being of both the tree(s) and structure.  All of this makes for a compelling and informative read about a subject many people will no doubt highly appreciate.