Mike Zamara got the idea for a new guesthouse after he had built his daughter a play tree house. A part-time rancher in British Columbia’s East Kootenays, Mike and his wife Debbie and daughter Kayla decided they would make a tree house to rent to tourists, one that would be adult-sized with a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, sitting room and lots of handmade details.

“It’s kind of magical being high up there in the trees,” says Zamara, who already has a popular log cabin that he rents to paying visitors.  “As a kid, I loved building tree houses. Building this one for business reasons was an excuse to do something that fascinated me and to relive a childhood fantasy. The business aspect was just a way to justify investing the money and time to go all out and build a big tree house.”

Zamara’s ideas for creating an enchanting new ‘tree-sort’ included using building materials such as unusual wooden features that he carved himself or found while walking outdoors.

“I scrounged in the woods and mountains for what I call character wood,” he says. “Like burls and crooked, twisted branches on the ground or small trees. We used the twisted wood for spiral stairways and railings. And, I made the sink in the bathroom from a large tree burl.”

Most of the other construction lumber came from logs that were milled from timber on Zamara’s property. That’s why he named the tree house ‘Outa the Woods’ –  it was literally built out of the woods on Zamara’s land.

After walking around his 160-acre property, Zamara found the perfect spot for the tree house – a stand of seven sturdy trees with views of the nearby Rocky Mountains and a spring below.  Zamara had ponds excavated near the site, which he plans to stock with trout that can be viewed from the deck of the tree house.

Zamara used no building plans or drawings. He worked out the details as he went along and with carpenters he hired after building a supporting platform made with 12 X 13-inch beams.

“A friend and I cut level notches into the bark of the trees with a surveyor’s transit and bolted the beams into the notches. We cut one-inch-deep into the trees past the cambium layer of inner bark, so the beams wouldn’t move as the trees grew outward. Once the beams were level and secure, I put decking on top of them. The finished deck was 20 X 26 feet.”

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The first carpenter to work with Zamara helped build the walls of the tree house’s ground floor. “We built the walls, complete with windows, on the deck,” says Zamara, who had to make a pulley system to raise materials from the ground to the deck.

“One large pulley was mounted on a bracket and bolted about 35-feet-high on a tree. The second large pulley was mounted near the base of the same tree so that I was able to pull horizontally on a rope with my truck to raise the loads vertically to the deck.”

Zamara used a portable generator to energize power tools because the tree house area is not connected to the electricity grid.

Zamara worked on the tree house over a period of three years because he built it in his spare time. He added the tree house’s second storey and metal roof in the second year, working with an experienced woodworker and friend, Ben van der Werf. The woodworker installed one of two spiral staircases, which went from the ground to the first floor of the tree house. Zamara and a friend, Robert Hill, built another spiral staircase from the first to the second storey.

Spiral staircases are labour intensive to make by hand, but they are functional and add rustic charm to the tree house. “There is so little floor space that there wasn’t room for a traditional stairway inside,” Zamara says.

Inside the tree house, the stove, fridge, and hot water heater are propane fueled. Solar power provides lighting and the bathroom has a composting toilet. Water is pumped up to the tree house from a spring using solar energy. Drinking water is fed through a filter to ensure it’s safe for human consumption.

Debbie added interior design touches such as the stone floor in the bathroom and artistically sculpted stucco walls, along with some added touches by Kayla.

One of the major difficulties with a tree house structure is its vulnerability in windstorms. “I hired an arborist to prune the trees for safety,” says Zamara. “He also joined the seven supporting trees together with cables and cabled the trees to the ground. I’m now planning to use a heavy-duty truck tire tube as a shock absorber where all the cables join together on one tree.”

Zamara’s ‘tree-sort’ was ready for its first rental season last summer. “We have an environmentally friendly building here,” says Zamara. Although the humble Zamara wouldn’t say so himself, he has succeeded in creating a unique dwelling with a frugal investment of $32,000, untold sweat equity, mountain-inspired creativity and plain old, salt-of-the-earth ingenuity.
-Photography by Randy Fiedler, July/August 2005
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