I have built my first tree-terrace in Ireland, on a 300 years old ash-tree of my friend Paddy Fogarty from Ballinderry on lake Derg, “whisky-man” as he was better known in the village for drinking a lot of whisky without to get drunk. I had his permission to built the terrace just for fun using the waste timber from a close building site where I was working for the architect Antony John Murphy based in Thurles. Up on that majestic living monument, at four meters above the ground level, every night, at the sunset, from that terrace I was capable to enjoy the miracle of Nature all around me with different points of view, to hear different sounds, to live that tree like a bird, like the wind. Every night the ash gifted to me the extraordinary spectacle of the sun to change the guard with the moon while a couple of giant Irish crows do not scared by me made me company on the terrace as I was one of them. Me and Paddy knew that terrace was more than a simple building experiment, it was arboreal architecture. A couple of days before my departure from Ireland, Paddy tells me “Thomas, I was intentioned to cut it down for money selling its timber but now I can’t, not anymore, your terrace has exalted the natural beauty of the ash and it has no price… I will keep it alive”. It was from these Paddy’s lesson I thought to use wood and trees much more to create arboreal architecture rather than simple wooden architecture, tree-centric architecture to exalt Nature’s beauty more than simple treehouses as my ability to create houses up on the trees.

I have designed and built treehouses by my own and in collaboration with the Treehouse Company by John Harris, and also for some really special clients such as Prince Alexander von Liechtenstein and Princess Astrid Kohl, Prince and Duke Sigieri Diaz Della Vittoria Pallavicini, Umberta Beretta, but every time, small or huge, poor or rich the project is, I never forget Paddy’s lesson since the first drawings: I must create arboreal poetry to exalt an already existing arboreal beauty, and not blatant arrogant architecture in competition with it. What makes a treehouse magic, unique, exclusive, luxury, is how much it dialogues with the genius loci of the forest, how much it exalts the beauty of its trees, how much we are capable to create the arboreal integration of our architecture into the natural forest harmony and not on the contrary how much we are capable to integrate the forest into the artificial built. In the first case, we write remarkable pages of TreGaard’s history, we create arboreal architecture. In the second case, we simply build houses up on trees.