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Architects: De Matos Ryan
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:Hufton+Crow
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Manufacturers: Garnica Plywood, Timber Workshop
Text description provided by the architects. De Matos Ryan has created an innovative, tree-less treehouse in the garden of a North West London townhouse. De Matos Ryan Director Angus Morrogh-Ryan comments, “Our client was a young family, who lamented the loss of an ailing tree in their neighbor’s garden. The children longed to have a treehouse but were prevented from doing so by having no trees of their own. The brief was, therefore, to design a treehouse without a tree.”
The new, 4.1m high space was designed in collaboration with the client’s children. Their unencumbered view of the world acted as a catalyst for a highly innovative and imaginative concept. Ideas were developed around creating a den that could only be accessed by children with an elevated look-out or crow’s nest. The children’s favorite cartoon, Danger Mouse, heavily influenced the design.
Danger Mouse’s reluctant assistant and sidekick Ernest Penfold is a timid, bespectacled hamster with the codename ‘Jigsaw’ because, at the first sign of danger, he falls apart. The playful new treehouse was going to be Penfold’s hideout. His codename gave license to develop a geometric frame that looks exactly like the way it was built.
De Matos Ryan’s starting point was to design an entirely expressed timber frame structure, sufficiently abstract to allow the children’s imagination to run wild and without creating a literal representation of a tree. On a practical level, the structure needed to be prefabricated in pieces and carried through the house via domestic scaled doors at the front and back.
The resulting design is a series of triangular Douglas fir frames which combine to make a truncated pyramidal form. At the bottom, the triangles start with rows of seven and five. The Siberian larch slatted cladding has a stainless-steel cable lattice to encourage climbing plants over the volume and ultimately create the sense of a tree that never was.
The unusual form and scale of the structure provide scope for imaginative play and permissive exploration, whereby at any point it can be simultaneously reminiscent of limitless dramatic inquiries such as a hollowed tree trunk, a spaceship, or a castle turret. Adults are somewhat prevented from accessing the interior by a low portal where one must stoop under and crawl into the structure. Within the space, the top look-out level is accessed by a timber and rope ladder.
The children can peer out through a series of windows designed to echo the structure’s shape, these can also be opened to provide ventilation to the space. An electric, rain-sensor rooflight sits at the top of the structure which automatically closes as soon as rain begins to fall.
External grade LED architectural tube lighting has been used inside the space to ensure that the children can continue to play on darker days or when the sun has gone down. The structure was put together onsite within one week, including all the cladding and windows. Due to its unusual height and form for a rear garden, planning permission was sought and achieved with the only condition being that the structure would need to be disassembled and removed when the property was sold.
