Everything You Need for a Treehouse

‘Everything you need for a treehouse starts with time and looking up and imagining a home of timber and rafters in wrangled, gnarled bark.’

Who can resist the lure of childhood enchantment and playing outdoors revelling in the natural world embodied in this unusual offering from Higgins and Hughes. The text is a lyrical telling of where said treehouse might be situated: will it stand alone or be located somewhere in a forest? Other vital elements are timber, tools, ropes, boxes and crucially, imagination.

Emily Hughes illustrations are full of whimsy and an absolute delight. You’ll need time to spend poring over every spread. I particularly love this notion of bookshelves built into the construction.

Every one of the magical spaces created in this book is a celebration of creativity and collaboration, while the final spread brings readers right back down to earth again with a view of small children in a backyard with an oak seedling for as the author said at the outset, ‘Everything you need … starts with time.’

From endpaper to endpaper, a dream of a book that will surely bring out the wild child in all of us.