Loftwood is an architecture studio in Alder Bend, Oregon. We design retreats, studios and guest houses in living trees, with an arborist on every drawing and a single steel bolt where most builders use twenty screws.
The first treehouse I designed was for my mother in 2012, in a Douglas fir she planted the year I was born. I did everything a city architect does and got most of it wrong. I bolted too often, left no room for the trunk, and dug a footing straight through the roots. The tree let me know within two summers.
Loftwood started the next year with the work in a different order: the tree first, then the arborist, then the engineer, and only then the drawing. Tom Reyes, our consulting arborist, has stood under every one of our forty-one buildings before a line was drawn. We have turned down more trees than we have built in, and we have not lost one.
Ida Loft
Founding architect
Prices include design, engineering, permits, the tree survey and installation. They move with height, access, and how far the crew drives from Alder Bend.
From $140,000
A single room for sleeping above the ground: a bed turned to the best view in the canopy, a wood stove, a shower, and a deck on the side that gets the evening sun.
From $95,000
A room for work, turned to the north light with a desk as long as the wall. Power, fibre and heat, no plumbing, and a door that shuts on the house for the whole working day.
From $220,000
Two rooms, a kitchen and a full bathroom, for guests who stay the week. Water and drains run up the trunk in flexible lines, and the house usually spans two or three trees.
This is the Glasshouse in section: one room on a 31 inch Douglas fir, its far end resting on a red alder. Six details decide whether a tree lives with a house for fifty years or dies under it in five. Select a note to find it in the drawing.
Seven of the forty-one. Most of our buildings are on private land, and we only publish the ones whose owners said yes.
2 weeks
Ida and our consulting arborist, Tom Reyes, visit with a resistance drill and a tape. We test the wood, map the roots and tell you plainly whether your tree can carry a building. The survey is $2,400, credited against the build.
10 to 14 weeks
Sketches made under the tree, then a timber model at one to twenty that you can hold. Two rounds of changes are included, and the model is yours to keep.
6 to 10 weeks
Our structural engineer sizes every bolt and bracket for your tree, your snow load and your wind. We deal with the county, which for a treehouse is usually a conversation before it is a form.
12 to 16 weeks
Floor, walls and roof are made as panels in our shop in Alder Bend, so your tree hears a few weeks of work instead of a few months.
3 to 6 weeks
A crew of five sets the bolts, lifts the panels and finishes the inside. You get the keys and a care sheet written for your species, not for trees in general.
Then we come back at one year, three years and ten, and look at the tree first and the house second. Those visits are part of the price.
The studio is a converted hop kiln on the edge of Alder Bend: a drawing room upstairs, a model shop beside it, and a timber workshop on the old drying floor. Every design is built first as a model at one to twenty, from the same timber as the real thing, and tested in the hands of the people who will sleep in it.
Nine of us work there. Three architects, a structural engineer, and five carpenters who also do the installing, so the people who draw your building are the people who bolt it to your tree.
“We asked for a writing room. Ida spent the first afternoon on her back under the maple, and the window she drew frames the one branch I now look at every morning.”
A photo of the trunk and a rough measurement around it at chest height is enough to start. Ida reads every enquiry and replies within three working days, often with a question you had not thought to ask.