There's No Office Like Home

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When he sits at his computer desk during the day, running Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to keep track of project budgets and his profit-and-loss statements, using Intuit's QuickBooks to manage his accounting, answering E-mail, or surfing the Internet for ideas that Judy can adapt to the association's Web site, Nelson is face-to-beak with woodpeckers and wrens on the other side of the glass window. In the evening, after his 8-year-old daughter and 5-year-old twin sons have gone to sleep, he often crosses the yard and goes back to the tree house for some uninterrupted design work, sitting at his drafting table on a kneeling chair under the glow of green-shaded shop lights. Breaktime gives him a chance for contemplation on the tree house's tiny green-railed porch.

Nelson and his coauthor, Gerry Hadden, wrote Home Tree Home on Nelson's PC in this tree-house office. There have been a few drawbacks, he admits: times when the wind was blowing so hard they would lose power and have to continue writing on laptops at the kitchen table in the mobile home below or when field mice chewed up and shorted out the electrical system. One day, Nelson promises, he'll replace the standard 10-gauge house wire that snakes up one of the tree trunks with a properly sized underground cable that will come up into a subpanel with its own circuit breakers. That should take care of the problems.

Tree houses are cheap--the Nelsons' cost about $7,000 in mostly recycled materials (remilled fir, hemlock, and cedar). They're convenient, conducive to concentration, and fun. So why haven't more people built their home offices in them? "In most places you can't get a permit for a tree house, so you have to be able to tolerate being an outlaw," Nelson explains. Conventional houses in Seattle are built to withstand 80-mph winds, and because it's difficult to establish similar standards for tree houses, counties and municipalities fear liability suits. Yet having a home office in a tree is a lot less risky than living there full-time. In a really bad storm, Nelson can always come back down to Earth.

Nelson says he learns new things about tree-house construction with every project he undertakes--including how best to customize his lofty structures for home-office use. His neighbor John Rouches had been part of the construction crew that built one of the tree houses described in Nelson's first book, and now the two carpenters are crafting a tree-house office for Rouches's financial-planning and investment consultancy, Wings Over Water Inc. The tree house, with its wraparound deck, will stand among 30-year-old cedars and have more than 175 square feet of interior space. Plans call for installation of cable TV, in case Rouches decides to run his communications over cable lines, and a 50-amp electrical service to run his two electric heaters and his office equipment--a 233 MHz Dell PC, a printer, a fax machine, and a personal copier. "When I was working in Seattle in a downtown office, I did all I could to get outside," Rouches says. "Now, since I answer to no one but myself, I need to stay motivated. Looking out at the pasture and the trees beyond gives me a sense of freedom."

This month Pete Nelson will be heading off to Lynn Meadows Discovery Center, in Gulfport, Miss., to build three tree houses as the first stage of a planned tree-house village, a memorial for a local girl who was killed in an automobile accident. Two of the tree houses are being designed by Mississippi architects who have been faxing their designs to Nelson; the third will be a Nelson original. Acting as both the structural consultant and the chief site architect, Nelson will strap on his tool belt and direct the efforts of a group of Navy Seabees and civilians who are volunteering their labor for a five-day building marathon.

"Originally, I thought what was important about a tree house was its architecture," Nelson says, "but I've come to realize that it's about trees, which means that you want as much light and as many windows as you can have. A tree is a living being. It gives off an energy you can feel."

Susanna & Will: Transition House
Anyone who has ever built a new home knows that a construction site can be an arena for the careful--and serendipitous--crafting of new identities. When Susanna Opper and Will Ryan decided to create a home-office suite in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts to accommodate their two established businesses and a new start-up, they knew that they had a single chance to do it right. Three zones--the private area, the business offices, and the transitional place where the house's entryway opens into a great room suitable for either business meetings or personal entertaining--would demonstrate to their friends and clients alike how life and work can be merged and enhance each other. It was, Opper muses now, "an expensive metaphor."

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