The Horizon’s Edge perches on the edge of a planter and features curved roofs with a playful arrangement of living space. (Photo courtesy Aaron Sanders)
Anyone who had a treehouse as part of their childhood knows how it could allow the imagination to wander.
It could be a castle one day, defending a monarch’s treasure, a pirate ship the next, and always a place to escape any unwanted realities of life.
So impactful is the experience that adult treehouse lovers have gone on to build full-scale, livable tree houses in the woods a la “Swiss Family Robinson.”
Australian 3D designer Lars Wijers has taken tree houses in the opposite direction. Instead of scaling up, he created a series of intricate Tiny Treehouses that hang on, hook to or stick in potted plants and trees.
“One afternoon I was daydreaming on my plant-filled balcony, and I just started imagining little homes in the plants where garden elves might live,” he said.
A few sketches turned into technical drawings and then a prototype emerged. Wijers said Tiny Treehouses started as a pandemic passion project in 2020 and the idea quickly blew by his Kickstarter target of $20,000, reaching more than $300,000 for product development and mass production.
The project’s website, tiny-treehouses.com, features eight designs, most of them at 1:100 scale, and a USB lighting accessory. Each has about 100 pieces intricately cut into thin sheets of wood.
It’s not a house you could live in, but after a few hours it may take to put it together, you can let it take you wherever your imagination wants to go.
