Cowlitz County’s Goat Island could become Treehouse Island within two years.
Under the direction of Battle Ground-based Kiddigan Investments, the development on Silver Lake would be just what it sounds like – an island full of treehouses.
Keebler Elf and Ewok jokes aside, these would be adult treehouses, custom built as vacation cabins, workspaces and year-round residences.
“Generally, people hear about this (project) and laugh,” said Jim Misner, a capital partner of Kiddigan with Nikki White and Grady Eilts. “Then they call us a few days later and say, ‘How does this work?’ ”
Misner and Eilts have worked in construction for more than 40 years combined – Misner owns Brush Prairie-based Pro-Touch Painting and Eilts owns Battle Ground-based Stepping Stone Concrete. White is a six-year Realtor, now with Vancouver-based Moxie Group at Keller Williams Realty.
Kiddigan’s leaders own the island and hope to build the first treehouse by spring, to have seven treehouses developed for rental within two years, then sell the remaining $175,000 lots for construction of private treehouses. There are about 40 lots on the 50-acre island, total.
“We want to sell people their youth back,” Misner said.
Beyond play houses
The concept of building treehouses for adults has taken root slowly, and got a boost in 1994 when Houghton Mifflin published “Treehouses: The art and craft of living out on a limb.”
Author Pete Nelson is an adviser for the Treehouse Island project and co-founded Seattle-based TreeHouse Workshop Inc. with Jake Jacobs in 1997.
Building treehouses can be a risky venture, but not as risky as one might think, said Nelson and Misner.
“The strongest building support you can use is a cylinder, and a treehouse is a series of cylinders,” Misner said.
“Having built houses for so many years, my least favorite part is bringing in an excavator and cement trucks and doing foundation work,” said Nelson, a 20-year contractor. “Here, in any weather, you’re working with wood right away. It’s clean. And trees are fabulous foundations in their own right.”
New technology has led to advances in the craft, meaning a treehouse that takes three to eight weeks to build could be around for 100 years, Eilts said. For example, tree anchored bolts (TABs) are now used as artificial limbs to provide stability with help from supporting beams and joists.
Design of a treehouse depends on a tree’s formation, and many are built on multiple trees.
“You want your beams to be flexible enough that when the tree grows it moves out on the TAB,” Nelson said. “Trees can lift a sidewalk up with their roots. It’s the same premise except now we’re hanging on the side of a tree.”
His company has built treehouses as heavy as 135,000 pounds. The structures at Treehouse Island will be as big as 850 square feet with full insulation, plumbing and heating. There are plans for power, water and sewer lines with horizontal drilling underwater.
“A tree has capacity to take that kind of weight,” Nelson said. “It’s stressing the tree and yet the tree reacts. (Trees) grow wood where they need it.”
TreeHouse Workshop grossed $1.2 million in 2007 and has eight full-time carpenters.
Their meticulous attention to luxurious details and amenities such as fireplaces, cabinets, kitchen bars, electric toilets and hot tubs have made some of the company’s projects worth nearly $700,000, Nelson said.
Most of its projects are worth at least $300 per square foot.
Treehouse furniture is often built in or brought in by pulley or up suspended steps and circular staircases, Eilts said.
“The (clients) we work for now are really boiled down to the uber-rich,” Nelson said. “They’re dreamers, but they also follow through on their dreams.”
The treehouse approach
At this point, Treehouse Island is little more than a dream, a piece of land and stacks of plans. But Kiddigan’s leaders are confident in presenting the project to the public at this early stage.
That approach is not unusual among treehouse builders, Nelson said. The excitement of a treehouse project can make builders act fast.
“We don’t have patience – we want to build it fast and small,” he said. “It’s easy to forget about (things like) permit issues that can be stumbling blocks.”
“A lot of people who do this aren’t builders, they’re dreamers,” White said.
The world has few existing treehouse resorts, but Kiddigan has a nearby model in Out ’n’ About Treehouse Treesort, developed by Michael Garnier in Takilma, Ore.
Treehouse Island will likely be available for corporate events, concerts, weddings, tours and treehouse rentals with lighted chipped wood trails, workout stations and meditation and prayer houses. A common area would include a laundry facility, bathrooms and recreation area.
Kiddigan owns a mainland acre about 1,500 feet from the island that would house a general store, post office boxes, a parking lot and a boat dock, accessible by a Kiddigan ferry.
The partners are shopping for investors and hope their professional backgrounds, plus guidance from Nelson’s company, will turn their treehouse dream into a reality that makes treehouses feasible for builders and safe for visitors with minimal environmental impacts.
TROUBLE IN THE TREETOPS
Peter Nelson helped pave the way for the relatively new custom treehouse industry, co-founding Seattle-based TreeHouse Workshop Inc.
The company has built more than 100 treehouses in 30 states and seven countries.
Amidst that success, King County sued Nelson in May with an order to tear down a treehouse he built near Raging River, alleging the structure was too close to an aquatic buffer zone.
It didn’t help that Nelson built it without permits required for structures larger than 250 square feet, or that he built it for commercial use.
“There are no laws about treehouses specifically,” said Nelson, adding that only eight of his company’s projects have required permits.
Nelson said he consulted with King County on his plans for the treehouse two and a half years ago.
“I told them what I wanted to do and the conclusion was that there was no way for me to do it through the normal means,” he said. “I’m a little impatient, so my strategy was to build this thing, show it to them and say, ‘Here it is. What’s the problem?’”
Until the lawsuit surfaced, Nelson’s approach – and advice to other treehouse builders – was often to “beg for forgiveness rather than permission,” he said.
But since the lawsuit, his strategy is changing.
“It kind of bit me in the butt in a big way,” he said. “You have to play by their rules. Maybe you can change those rules.”
The county approved Nelson’s appeal Nov. 4, confirmed that the structure has minimal environmental impacts and invited him to work with the University of Washington to develop treehouse codes.
“We’ve got a framework to move ahead,” Nelson said. “We finally identified ways to get through the code together and make it a reality.
WORKING WITH THE UNKNOWN
When it comes to Kiddigan Investments’ Treehouse Island project, the developers’ enthusiasm is nearly contagious.
There’s just one catch. An island full of treehouses with commercial, residential and recreational use wasn’t part of the plan when Cowlitz County set its building codes.
“We’re selling the county on something that they support but have never seen before,” said Jim Misner, a Kiddigan capital partner.
Mike Wojtowicz, the county’s director of building and planning, wouldn’t comment on whether the county supports the project because, other than several pre-application meetings with Kiddigan, he hasn’t seen designs, plans or permit applications for it.
He said concerns for the project would likely include density of lot layouts, access to water and sewer services and access for emergency vehicles.
“There are obviously environmental constraints, primarily with the wetlands on the project site,” Wojtowicz said. “There have been no developments on this island that tried to obtain permits that I know of.”
But there are provisions for those details, said Misner and Christina Simon, Kiddigan’s project engineer and president of Vancouver-based C.A. Simon and Assoc. Inc.
She is preparing a county comprehensive plan amendment proposal, studies on wildlife, wetland delineation and a State Environmental Protection Act checklist to go with Kiddigan’s permit applications, which she expects will be ready by mid-December.
“From a professional standpoint, they’ve got the right idea – they’ve got the right passion,” Simon said of Kiddigan’s leaders.
Charity Thompson can be reached at cthompson@vbjusa.com.
