“Look!” says Ąžuolas Titus, who’s just turned seven. He presents a purple newt spattered with mud while his older brothers, Vakaris, twelve, and Vėjas, nine, hold their labradoodle, Blue, at bay. Suddenly, they’re all off—dog in tow—racing along the top of a ridge in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

There’s a sense of boundless freedom here, which is exactly what the boys’ parents, Jason Titus and Nerija Sinkevičiūtė-Titus, have been working to cultivate since they purchased their forested 32-acre retreat in 2008. A growing network of trails leads down to a creek and out to sweeping vistas over the woods. Trees and gardens planted years back now bear a bounty of fruits and vegetables, and an old barn hosts a ceramics studio and a workshop for tinkering on odd projects. More recently, the couple took to the trees for an aerial intervention.

Paces down a dirt path from their home on the property is a new tree house built by a friend of the family, San Francisco–based artist and designer Jay Nelson. This tree house, however, is not like any tree house you grew up with. Weaving through a stand of redwoods, it carries all the inimitable charms of Nelson’s imaginative, woodsy, and weatherworn aesthetic. (His previous work includes a camper built on the back of a Subaru Brat and a small rough-hewn home on Kauai.) Made mostly of reclaimed wood, it looks like a ship lost in an ocean of trees.

A rope bridge slung across a ravine leads to the first level. Blue, though adventurous, is too timid to cross. Rising up from the decking is an elevated, airy structure primarily accessible via a ladder, although the slatted wood siding provides endless alternate routes. Portholes give the tree house its maritime flavor and allow the Titus brothers to peer out into the forest.

“The kids run around, they hike. The first summer, we made a trail that goes to the creek, so we would go down there barefoot and swim and come back. It was just idyllic.”
—Nerija Sinkevičiūtė-Titus, resident

Nelson says this level was all that was included in the original plan. However, after construction was completed, he saw another opportunity. At the back of the platform, a space between two trees provided just enough room for a staircase. Jason and Nerija, somewhat envious of the space Nelson was creating for their kids, gave him the green light to build an addition that could accommodate the whole family.

An angled sliding glass door—“I meant for it to be straight,” laughs Nelson—leads into a shingled, weathertight structure. A woodburning stove stands in the center, surrounded by built-ins that include a bench and a twin bed with a pull-out. Hinged windows fold away horizontally to provide open-air views into the forest. Yet another ladder ascends to a lofted nook for reading, napping, or enjoying an even better view.

Making the tree house appear to perch so lightly within the redwoods was no simple task. “Building tree houses is dangerous—and time-consuming,” says Nelson, who estimates that he’s built about 10 or so. “It takes a lot of patience, a lot of dreaming.” Dreaming is one of his strong suits. To begin this project, he built a platform in the trees where he could sit and imagine how the pieces might fall into place.

As the process progressed, he and his assistants, Max Schulz and Sam Buchanan, assembled parts of the structure while hanging from ropes in harnesses. For the tree house’s maiden voyage last year, Jason and the kids had a sleepover on Father’s Day.

That fall, a fire swept through the area, burning right up to the property line. “We were evacuated, and it was very, very stressful the whole time,” Jason remembers. The family found refuge back at their primary residence just over the hill in Palo Alto, but before leaving the woods, Jason tacked a public-access camera to a telephone pole near the house. He recalls monitoring the feed with Nerija—and trading off watch with their mountain neighbors—to provide real-time intel to the fire department. “The fires actually brought us closer to the community,” Nerija says.

Now that the Tituses have resumed spending time on the land, the kids are just starting to make the tree house their own. Signs reading KIDS ONLY mark the entrance, replacing a missing ceramic sign that Nerija made before the build even began. “They can’t wait to have friends over,” she says, pointing out that the tree house will make for one heck of a water fight zone come summer, so long as it’s safe to have company.

The property remains a work in progress, but with each new project it gets a little closer to becoming the paradise Jason and Nerija envisioned more than a decade ago. As the couple pass by the fencing that flanks the rope bridge, Nerija exclaims, “Oh, here it is!” Smiling fondly, she reaches down to pick up a sign broken into two pieces that reads TO TREE HOUSE. They pause, searching for the poetry in the fractured ceramic. “We don’t really need it anymore,” says Jason. “The tree house is finished.”

Project Credits:

Designer: Jay Nelson

Hardware Engineering & Fabrication: Michael Garnier

Construction: Max Schulz, Sam Buchanan, and Jay Nelson

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A Family of Five Adds a Whimsical Tree House to Their Slice of Paradise in Northern California