Blackberry Mountain Treehouse

Designed as a retreat for a busy couple vacationing from a bustling city, our team carefully crafted an experiential approach to allow visitors to slowly decompress as they travel to the home. Starting with the drive up the mountain from the Little River valley in Walland, TN and climbing to an elevation of 2340 feet, visitors drive down a gently sloped asphalt driveway to a crushed stone motor court. The crushed stone provides visitors with a tactile and auditory connection to the landscape, made especially apparent by the quietness of the natural surroundings.

The motor court is intentionally separated from the Treehouse by a 90-foot walk; starting with a flagstone path, transitioning to an Ipe wood boardwalk, and slowly becoming a bridge as the mountainous grade slopes away. Over this walk, visitors slowly find themselves within the tree canopy and are met by a simply detailed opaque box, clad with stone that has been quarried on the mountain. Greeted by a blackened steel entry portal and a quarter-pivot blackened steel door, visitors interact with a vertical wooden bar handle and enter the home.

Upon entering, visitors are drawn through an open-air corridor clad with blackened steel and given their first uninterrupted glimpse of the mountains, framed by the compressive black walls and ceiling. On the other side of the corridor, guests step onto an entry deck surrounded by old-growth treetops and experience the expansive, breathtaking view of the Smoky Mountains.

The steel and glass Treehouse is intentionally hidden behind the stone mass as if it were a secret enclave that only visitors are allowed to discover. Upon entering, visitors feel anchored by the stone mass yet secluded from the world because of it. The bed is anchored by the stone wall and flanked by cased openings into the stone mass on either side. The kitchen features a window looking back into the blackened steel entry corridor and through a wood storage alcove to the west. On the right, visitors are drawn into the bathroom with a view of a granite-carved tub, overlooking the forest to the east.

the living space seamlessly extends through a 6-panel multi-slide door onto a cantilevered deck. It is there, while standing against the handrail overlooking the mountains, that visitors fully experience a 180-degree vista of mountains and sky.

Framework for Design Excellence

Our design process was driven by various aspects, each interwoven and building upon one another. At the design’s core mission was a response to the increased priority of mental health and wellbeing in our culture, and the need for spaces and environments that allow one to retreat from their daily life and recharge, especially within a natural environment. This mission goes hand in hand with Designing for Integration and Well-being given the way built environments and structures can employ connection to place and a user’s experience as a means of improving mental health. Supporting design considerations included Designing for Resources and Discovery when applying material selection and durability to the design, as well as the technical detailing of exposed structural systems with relation to learning experiences.

Given the structure’s setting in nature and the inherent beauty of the surrounding wooded, mountainous terrain, the design’s positive effect on mental and social well-being became an inherent strategy. The user’s approach sequence alone was designed to create refuge and natural discovery, creating a feeling of seclusion whilst still being grounded in a connection to the landscape through the built form clad in stone quarried nearby. The vistas of the Smoky Mountains serve as a visual landmark to give visitors a deep-rooted sense of place and existential perspective. Views of the mountains are framed in various ways through corridors, punched openings, doorways, and expanses of glass. With floor-to-ceiling glass in the sleeping and living areas, the line between architecture and nature becomes virtually non-existent – with the treetops, leaves, and mountains serving as the rooms’ walls. Lastly, a healthy lifestyle is encouraged through the site’s access to hiking and biking trails. Wood storage is integrated into the entry corridor to encourage visitors to split and store their own firewood, to create ambiance at night in the living room’s suspended fireplace. All design strategies work with one another to create space for restoration, relaxation and sensory retreat, increasing visitor well-being and reducing stress.

The design team also took special care when selecting materials for the home and worked closely with the structural engineering team while detailing how they interfaced with the exposed steel structure. The structure was fully designed and is a feat of craft and knowledge in engineering given the intricately detailed suspended floor structure, tight tolerances with glass exterior walls, thinly profiled roof system, and 11 ft cantilevered deck and roof structures. Its vertical steel columns blend with the surrounding vertical tree trunks, allowing the structure to become an extension of the forest. The roof features a steel C-channel fascia which both structurally supports the roof perimeter and serves as the finish exterior material. The architectural team concealed a gutter behind the C-channel fascia and integrated downspouts along the column lines, detailed the exterior materials at the roof soffit and underside of floor structure to cleanly meet the exposed steel. Locally quarried stone was selected as a cladding to celebrate local materials and reduce embodied carbon, and local steel fabricators were consulted for detailing and future construction of blackened steel panels and the custom quarter pivot steel entry door.