Cabanes d’exception

The perfect dream of every child is to build a tree house. The ideal place to hide, to dream, to plot or to count marbles … The Cabane Perchée association, founded by a former advertiser, has turned it into something very serious. During some ten years now it has built over two hundred of these houses that would have enchanted Italo Calvino’s Baron in the trees. Some are very sober, others luxurious, with a king size bed and muslin curtains. They can be placed in a sequoia, or an oak tree – the most logical choices – as well as on a lime or even a cypress tree, they can barely stick out of the ground or fly 14 metres above it. This books draws up the census of these creations, an interesting contribution to contemporary architecture, if for no other reason due to the almost exclusive use of a natural material, wood.

• Cabanes d’exception texts by Ingrid Astier, photographs by Jacques Delacroix, La Martinière, 2009, 224 p., 42 €, ISBN : 978-2-7324-3939-6