Imagine enjoying your very own, one-of-a-kind 575 square foot cottage with huge glass windows, a lovely functional kitchen and bath and a gigantic deck with a breathtaking bird’s eye view of the beautiful mountains and forests of the Pacific Northwest. Now, imagine that this cottage is completely suspended in a large Spruce tree! Elevated Living designs these incredible prefab high-end tree homes for green families — and they are the perfect marriage of technology and nature, manufactured to have as little impact on the environment as possible.
Each Elevated Living prefab tree home is much more than a basic tree house. Their multifunctional uses include: outdoor living spaces, viewpoints, play structures, and decks. Complete with a fully functional living space, plumbing, electrical, and other modern-day conveniences found in a standard eco-friendly home, Elevated Living’s lofty abodes are made with green products and constructed with LEED certified building methods. Elevated Living is now taking orders for Spring/Summer 2010 installations. Contact Elevated Living for a free consultation and get started on the path to summer cottage ownership that’s relaxing for the whole family and easy on the earth.
+ Elevated Living Tree Home $20,000 and under (depending on customization)
5 Responses to “Elevated Living’s Eco-Friendly Tree Homes Take Outdoor Play to New Heights”
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However “green” the building materials might be…if the structure is attached through the tree, as this one is, it will ultimately kill the tree. Can we please be less Design Consumers and more reuse/recycle/ conserve conscious?
Sustainability has to become an ethic that guides our decisions and choices, not a design fad.
hjvilanova, you absolutely have no idea what you are talking about do you? This design does not imply that the tree will die at anytime because the design doesn’t even make sense. How is that deck going to hang in the air like that without any support from anywhere else. Just nailing it to that one tree is not going to get the job done, sorry but I built these as a child and from what I remember you need a better tree than that to build something that grand. Nice try though
How and why is this “green”? Because it’s a useless waste of resources attached to a tree in a forest? Because it is made of materials that came from a tree but cannot provide basic shelter because it has no roof and no means to access it? It’s a sculpture and nothing more. Another typical example of very poorly executed ideas that claim to be sustainable but are completely useless and thus are doomed to fail.
The best way to go about building a safe “green” tree house would be to use wood from items that are no longer needed or wanted. We should check your garage for wood shelving that we don’t need, or maybe an old table.We need a lot of scrap wood to make our own tree house safely.
it appears from the images in the slide show that this structure is not only anchored from below but also from above. it has been tested and proven multiple times that anchoring into a tree will not kill the tee if done properly and furthermore, anchored from top and bottom as shown should be more than capable of providing adequate structural stability for something of this size and relatively light-weight construction. this appears to be a structural model only as there is clearly no cladding. i would assume they are calling this green because it is made from recycled content or post consumer content – although i do concur that these materials all look quite new. additionally, i think the idea of living in a tree and off the grid is considered green these days, and since this “cottage” has no plumbing, hvac, or other systems that i can see connecting it to a grid, it would appears the final version is intended to be self-sufficient. while i do doubt the legitimacy of such a structure as being a suitable dwelling, it is an interesting idea to consider pre-fabbing tree house structures. im not sure why those of you who are determined to come here and rip up the article are here in the first place, but if you arent interested in whats being discussed feel free to “say nothing, if you have nothing nice to say.”