Text: R.J. Weick
The tree house, as an architectural archetype, has existed for millennia. It has served as both shelter and retreat, observation deck and platform, and workspace and recreational place, tapping into powerful and emotive senses like belonging, safety, creativity, and play. While it continues to serve as a fundamental and necessary structure for peoples and cultures to this day, it has also evolved into a modern-day destination and imaginative space in which nostalgia and adventure awaits. And for the long-time clients of Birchwood Construction Company in Harbor Springs, Michigan, this cedar-wrapped tree house was intentionally designed as a generational space for their
family to enjoy, inspired by the existing structures and natural landscape around it.
“We’ve been thinking about it for several years and decided to pull a switch on it in the summer of 2021,” the clients said. “The whole purpose of the tree house is to enhance the cottage area for our grandkids so they will want to be up there and they’ll want to keep coming up after they’re grown up and have kids of their own. It was undertaken with that in mind.”
The clients, who are familiar with the design and build process having navigated it several times before, said they like to take a ground-up approach to their projects, and when it came to those initial conversations with the tree house, it began with a checklist.
It was a checklist that not only outlined aesthetic and functional needs, but also how the tree house would fit within the generational family ecosystem—how it would be used and who would be using it—to ensure its design incorporated those integral elements into its finished product. The next step was to then have their grandkids meet with the design team, for which they also looked to Stephanie Baldwin, president, owner, and designer of Edgewater Design Group LLC of Petoskey, to help shape the envisioned concept into tangible, cedarlike form.
“We had most of our grandkids meet with the [designer] to give her a priority list of what should be included in this tree house. We weren’t able to use all of their ideas—we vetoed the swimming pool and the hot tub and trampoline—but we did include the fireman’s pole and the older kids wanted a quiet place where they might be able to read and get away from the rest of us folks,” the clients said. “That led to the second floor and I think they got everything they wanted with the exception of those few items.”
Tasked with envisioning a two-story tree house that fit contextually into the property, Edgewater Design looked to the existing structures and natural landscape for inspiration. The clients originally purchased the property in the early ’90s and had rebuilt the previous cottage structure shortly thereafter, noting with the cottage located near the lake at the bottom of the sloped property, they wanted to build the tree house on the top of the hill in the fairly large undeveloped section of the site.
“We went through a couple revisions on the drawings, most of which were aesthetics. Edgewater did a great job of incorporating the functional pieces into the original design, but then we started tweaking the aesthetics of the structure,” the clients said. “The design phase took us up until a little bit after Labor Day of 2022 and that is when Birchwood Construction began their work.”
For Birchwood Construction, building lasting relationships with their clients is the cornerstone to success, where every foundation laid is built on collaboration and communication. It is a mission that builds on a history and legacy of delivering distinctive custom homes and beautiful spaces for clients since its establishment in 1972, in which the team embraces a belief in family, communication, quality craftsmanship, leading with compassion and accountability, and giving back to the community.
“We’ve known them for quite some time. We like the quality of their work, we like their customer relationship, and we had looked at them for a previous project,” the clients said.
“Edgewater had also done the design work on another project for us, and Edgewater and Birchwood have an excellent working relationship, so that is what brought us all to-
gether. And when we started talking to Kenny Provost at Birchwood about the project, he got pretty excited and we thought it was going to be in good hands, as it was.”
Birchwood Construction as a company has since evolved in its 52-year history into a tightknit, collaborative team of craftspeople and individuals led by Kenny Provost, chief building officer and partner, and Tom Adams, chief business officer and partner, and is dedicated to bringing their clients’ visions to life and to placing family at the center of every build process. For them, the hope is that Birchwood Construction is known at the end of the day as a company that cares, and having worked with this client and his family several times in the past, the opportunity to be involved in the tree house build was special for the team.
“What excited us is that it is just not something you get to do every day. I mean, there are not a lot of people building extravagant tree houses and when it was brought to my attention, I just thought it was going to be a fun project and out of the ordinary. For me, it was also pretty important because that was the sixth project we’ve done for that family, that is pretty special. You just don’t get to do that often,” Provost said.
“The design was done when we got to start building it, and the grandkids did have a ton of input on that, but as far as the build process, any time a guy like this client is that excited to build something for his grandkids, it just makes it fun. Then you realize what you are building, and I think that is where the play comes in. You are not really looking at it as a project where you
electricity and an upstairs loft, the tree house is both functional and playful—made more so with its fireman’s pole, oversized stuffed animals, gaming features, and spiral slide.
“We love the look of it, it’s very functional, but most of all we liked the whole process of how it went together and the equity that the kids have in it. They were part of the planning process and they were also part of the construction process. The family did all of the painting and we pre-stained everything inside and out. We had three great friends of ours and all of the grandkids and their parents involved in that staining process,” the clients said. “They’ve all had a hand in it, so if you ask me what I like most about it, it was a family project and it’s ours. It’s a piece of us.”
For Provost, who noted it is the details that stand out to him the most about the project, it was such a fun and special project, collaborating with both the client and his family, and the design team.
“It is just not something you get to do every day,” Provost said. “I told the client he was an excellent grandpa. I don’t know many who would do that, and it’s an extremely well-built structure. It’s a steel structure and everything is wrapped in cedar that we had split and hollowed out, so it looked like it was growing out of the ground, but he really let us have our
way with it, which was cool. It was really the relationship that made it fun, just to go back and do another project for them, the family, that is what made it so special for me.”
are under this time crunch and the homeowner wants to get in. It was all about, ‘how do we make this that much better for the kids?’ That is where the fun came,” Provost added.
Featuring a pyramidal hip roof, half log siding, and exterior shake, this tree house takes on traditional log cabin inspiration nestled within its surrounding timbers. There are cedar-wrapped steel supports designed to appear as if growing out of the ground itself, built for structural integrity and longevity; cable rail to accent the wooden stairs and wraparound porch; and an upper balcony that overlooks the landscape. Inside, tongue and groove envelopes the interior space and large windows allow daylight to flood the intimate space, while a winding steel staircase leads to the upper level. Fully equipped with