Fed up with his fast-paced life in New York City, Foster Huntington quit his job, hopped into a Volkswagen van and traveled around the country before settling in Washington state to build his dream treehouse dwelling complete with a skate bowl and wood-fired soaking tub. The photos alone are enough to make anyone daydream about doing the same. Set against a hazy landscape just across the Columbia River from the Oregon border, two compact structures are nestled high up in the fir trees, connected by a meandering bridge.

The 27-year-old adventurer and photographer gathered a group of friends to help him make his dream into a reality. It took them about a year to complete ‘the Cinder Cone,’ as he calls it, with one building functioning as a sleeping cabin and the other a workshop. Each measures about 200 square feet, and the sleeping cabin has bunk beds and hammocks to fit a group.

The getaway feels like it’s in the middle of nowhere, but it’s close to Portland. The spacious hot tub on a deck further down the hillside keeps things cozy in cold weather, and Huntington and his guests have their own private skate park just a few steps down from the workshop. The friends involved in the building process referred to the Cinder Cone as “big-boys camp” and “Neverland.” It’s all very Portlandia, and The New York Times called it ‘Bro-topia,’ which sounds about right, but it’s hard to deny that the place is incredibly dreamy.

Huntington has produced both a short film and a photo book documenting the building process, and lots of photos – from the very beginning of the project to its enviable usage today – can be seen on his Instagram. 

We’ve seen tree houses that function as oversized sculptures, play structures for kids, sky-high tea houses and elevated retreats for work or meditation, but how many tree house designs actually fulfill dreams of living in the forest canopy full-time? These 12 residential tree houses range from traditional huts built over a hundred feet above the forest floor to a stunning ultramodern cylindrical glass house that envelops an entire tree.

Amazing Cylindrical Glass Treehouse

This ultramodern, all-glass cylindrical house isn’t just in the trees, it contains one. ‘Tree in the House’ by Masov Aibek is a four-story residence in the woods of Almaty City, Kazakhstan with a spiraling staircase leading to each completely transparent level. A few plasterboard walls provide privacy for the bathroom and sleeping areas. The house will be available for rent, and though it may seem like it’s only suitable for exhibitionists, its location deep in the forest makes privacy less of a concern.

Traditional Residential Treehouses of Asia

Papua New Guinea’s Korowai Tribe is just one example of people who have traditionally built their homes in the canopies of trees, some as high as 115 feet off the ground. The houses are typically built in a single sturdy Banyan tree, with poles added for extra support. Each house accommodates as many as a dozen people. Elevated houses can also be found in flood-prone areas of India, Cambodia and other Asian nations.

Finca Bellavista Treehouse Community, Costa Rica

A couple went to Costa Rica in search of a small plot of land and ended up saving 600 acres of rainforest from the chopping block. Uncertain at first what to do with all that acreage, they began to envision a network of tree houses that soon became ‘Finca Bellavista,’ a sustainable treehouse community with individual residences connected by zippiness and suspension bridges. The self-sustaining complex includes a dining hall, open-air lounge, campfire, bath house and ‘wedding garden.’

4Treehouse by Lukas Kos

Looking a bit like a Japanese lantern when it’s illuminated at night, the 4Treehouse by Toronto designer Lukasz Kos is a modern take on the classic wooden tree house with a facade of slats that provide shade and privacy. A semi-detached staircase on casters provides a stable, steady entrance to the home no matter how much the structure itself may be rocking in the wind.

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The High Life 12 Incredible Residential Tree House Designs

Luxurious and eco-friendly, Blue Forest‘s imaginative and playful tree houses, lodges and educational facilities seem to be designed to bring out every adult’s wide-eyed inner child. Blue Forest has designed many incredible structures that celebrate the warmth, coziness and sustainability of wood, honoring the material itself and of course, its source. Check out these 18 eye-catching, envy-inducing buildings made by the UK-based company.

Amberley Castle

Blue Forest’s best-known treehouse is located on the grounds of the Amberley Castle Country Hotel in Scotland. It’s used as a recreational getaway space for hotel guests, and also as a multi-purpose venue for corporate entertainment, meals, weddings and private parties.

RotatED School Concept

This intriguing concept design is a prefabricated, hand-crafted eco classroom that can be set onto a foundation on any of its six sides for a multitude of purposes including gallery space, nature observation and educational lectures.

Tongole Wilderness Lodge

Located on the Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve in Malawi, the Tongole Wilderness Lodge overlooks a river in one of the country’s last ‘truly unspoiled’ wildlife areas. Offered as an eco-friendly place to stay in the region, the open-air lodge was built from local materials including clay, rock, wood and thatch.

Eco Perch

From its diminutive-looking exterior, you would never guess that this Eco Perch vacation rental can sleep four people. Inside are a full-sized bed, bunks for children, a kitchen with a dining area and a full bathroom with shower. Based on Blue Forest’s treehouses, the unit is elevated from the ground. It can be delivered, assembled and ready for decoration with five days.

Cleveley Mere Tree House Hotel

This may just be one of the most luxurious treehouse vacation rentals in the UK. The contemporary lakeside treehouse for getaway spot Cleveley Mere can sleep up to six, with two bedrooms, a sun deck, floor-to-ceiling windows and a rope bridge.

Treehouse Study Center

One of Blue Forest’s educational facilities, the Treehouse Study Center teaches children about nature and the woods in the center of New Forest National Park in Hampshire. It includes two treehouse classrooms, ground-based buildings containing other facilities, canopy walkways, a rope bridge, solar-powered lighting, a water catchment system and biomass energy.

Tarifa Eco Lodge

The organic shape and natural materials of the Tarifa Eco Lodge make it ideal for a nature-oriented getaway. Located in the hills of Andalucia on the Spanish Costa de la Luz, the Tarifa Ecolodge overlooks the Straits of Gibraltar, with views of Africa. It gets its power and hot water from solar panels and has its own water catchment and purification system.

Treetop Holiday

The round Treetop Holiday tree house of Sussex, near the spa town of Royal Tunbridge Wells, is an eco-lodge in the countryside with views of farmland. To access it, you must cross a nearly 80-foot-long rope bridge over a scenic pond.

Longridge Training Center

Charming in its organic simplicity, the Longridge Training Center offers water sports and land-based activities for young people. Blue Forest gave this building, which includes kitchens, meeting rooms, a training hall and more, a full range of eco-friendly features like rainwater harvesting, a heat loss recovery system and lots of sustainably sourced wood.

Feltonfleet Treehouse School

Off-kilter windows give this cute treehouse school in Cobham lots of cheer and personality, adding to the uniqueness of the space. The Feltonfleet Preparatory School added the treehouse as a sustainable way for the school to extend its teaching space.

Center Parcs Treehouses

A stunning juxtaposition of rustic and contemporary style, these treehouses for the Center Parcs Sherwood Forest each have four double bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, open living spaces, kitchens and secondary treehouse ‘entertainment pods’ with home theaters and pool tables. As with all of Blue Forest’s projects, the treehouses are eco-friendly, with lake-source heat pumps, low-energy lighting and grey water recycling.

Enchanted Forest

Built along a small river in the Hertordshire countryside, Enchanted Forest is a two-story fantasy play structure for kids. It features a large main room and open turret with a ladder leading up through a ‘secret’ trap door to a hideaway upstairs, and even has a wood-burning stove.

Adventure Playground

This sprawling treehouse has a main ‘tower’ and several different decks that form a sprawling fantasy play area for kids, incorporating a central trampoline, swings and slides.

Woodland Haven

Quirky and fun, Woodland Haven was built around a central tree as an outdoor play area for children and includes a secret trap door, cargo net, fireman’s pole, monkey bars, swings, a slide and even a basket and pulley to lift items up to the treehouse. A swing bridge attaches it to a deck across the yard.

Fairfield Eco Classroom

Looking like nothing more than a stack of logs, this structure is actually a small and efficient pre-fabricated classroom. The Fairfield Eco-Classroom is raised nearly 7 feet from the ground and covered in a log facade, which was even applied to the window shutters to complete the illusion when they’re closed.

Treetops

Built about 14 feet off the ground at the edge of a forest in Cumbria, Northwest England, the fittingly named ‘Treetops’ is a rustic treehouse with a secondary drinks deck for adults, connected with a swinging rope bridge.

Benenden School

Ringed in copper, this round school building is made of sustainably harvested timber and constructed to blend into its woodland environment. The Benenden School eco classroom is the first building in the UK to process harvested rainwater from its sedum roof into hot and cold drinking water using only solar power.

Rainforest Encounter – Eden Project

Blue Forest has designed a nearly 500-foot canopy walkway for rainforest education resource The Eden Project in Cornwall. ‘Rainforest Encounter’ will be built within the Rainforest Biome at the center, taking visitors on a journey through the treetops nearly 40 feet above the ground.