Dust off your copy of ”Swiss Family Robinson” (book or movie), and gather round for a tale of three treehouses.
Part gazebo, part playhouse and all wonderment, these back-yard getaways built by Du Page families range from multistory to minimalist and blur the line between kids` stuff and grownup fantasy.
The most spectacular of them towers to three levels, looking out from a height of 50 feet over most of Warrenville. It was built in 1981 by plumbing contractor Richard Gluth, with help from two friends, in a huge silver maple tree in what was then Gluth`s back yard. The Gluth family has since moved to southern California.
Rick Gluth had grown up with a simple back-yard treehouse in Lombard. The 1960 Disney movie ”Swiss Family Robinson” and a trip to Disneyland opened his eyes to the ultimate treehouse possibilities.
Still, he maintains he was caught off guard when his plan to build a little surprise for his 3-year-old son Todd quickly turned into a rite of passage for him and his old buddies.
”It was the sheer delight of taking time out from our mid-life crisis to become kids again,” he said. ”It was sort of let`s-build-a-treehouse -for-Todd gone berserk.”
Toby Cetnar of Wheaton remembers how he sat with Gluth and Larry Koch of Lisle on the just-completed first deck, 18 feet in the air: ”We just sat there and kept looking up. We were saying, `What if, what if, how about if we do this or that?` Then it was, `How about one more big deck on top?` ”
The work was not kids` play. The three estimate they moved from 1 1/2 to 2 tons of lumber into the tree, pulling it up by bosun`s chair and a custom-built chain hoist. Gluth planned an inverted pyramid shape to move the weight down the trunk of the tree, and he allowed for high winds and heavy snowloads.
He said, ”The framework is like a giant spider web dictated by the tree; each level is different. Trying to hang upside down and hold a 200-pound board in one hand and a drill and socket wrench in the other gets kind of tense at times.”
In spite of that, Gluth said, ”I`m more proud that we imagined it at all than by the actual challenge of hoisting tons of lumber high into a tree.”
From imagination to reality took almost two summers to complete. At the topping-off party, guests climbed an aluminum ladder to the structure, which by then totaled 780 square feet on three decks. The lowest has a toilet; the middle is screened with electricity and running water; the top is a sun deck. The party tradition continues for the Warrenville treehouse; Cindy and James Hoch, who bought Gluth`s house in 1985, keep the treehouse off-limits to their three preschoolers and most other youngsters but recently entertained a large family group where many of the adults braved the climb.
”When you`re up there, you`re looking down on all the houses around. It`s so beautiful, especially in the fall,” said Cindy, a Warrenville native who watched the treehouse go up eight years ago.
”My dad loved it; he grew up on `Swiss Family Robinson,` the book, that is.”
Seven-year-old Brendan Detzner of Lombard may have been thinking of something like the Gluth-Hoch treehouse last spring when he asked his dad, Michael, to build a three-story teepee in one of the family`s apple trees.
Detzner scaled down the ambitious teepee plan and chose a tree that Brendan and his 5-year-old sister Sarah had long favored for climbing and perching.
”I didn`t draw an elaborate plan,” he said. ”I just figured it would be 6 by 8 feet and laid it out on the ground, put in the posts and luckily, it fits.”
Detzner, who teaches mentally handicapped students at Lyons Township High School in La Grange, decided on an elevated platform enclosed by a low wall with a gate. Overhead supports mark the outline of the roof he plans to add later. He incorporated design elements specified by Brendan and Sarah: a climbing rope, a respectably awesome altitude-about 7 feet-and access to a particular perch in the tree`s branches.
”Next spring it will have a tarp tied onto the frame, but eventually it will have a peaked wooden roof with a crow`s nest, because that`s a requirement (of Brendan`s and Sarah`s).”
The wooden ladder to the platform is sturdy and unchallenging.
”I don`t go up the ladder,” said Brendan. ”I like to climb up the tree and squeeze myself through the gate to get to the treehouse,” he said.
And once there, eye to eye with apple-heavy branches stirring gently in the breeze, comes the best part: ”I just sit in it.”
Before he had his own treehouse, Brendan was a regular at one down the street, built by the father of his friend Lee Fritz, also 7. Like Detzner, Robert Lee Fritz is an art teacher (in Villa Park`s Jefferson Junior High School) as well as a studio glass artist, and like Richard Gluth, he is a fan of ”Swiss Family Robinson.”
”It was my all-time favorite movie when I was a kid,” said Fritz.
”When you see that movie, you`ll see that a treehouse is really functional, the only way to live on a desert island.”
Also from his childhood, Fritz recalls a risky ascent into a treehouse built by a young buddy: ”It was about 40 feet high. There was no rope, no ladder. We had to climb up (the adjacent tree), and there were branches up to this limb, and then this limb went across a 10-foot span to the treehouse. I just did it because my friend did it. I went back later and looked across that span and thought, ”I can`t believe I did this.”`
By comparison, the two-level treehouse that Fritz built in a willow tree for Lee, 10-year-old Katie and 2 1/2-year-old Jonathan, registers many decibels lower on the parental alarm scale.
Katie, Lee and sometimes Jonathan scamper up a wooden ladder to the first level at 5 1/2 feet, then wiggle past the great tree trunk to stepped slats leading up another 6 1/2 feet to the trap door of the second level. As often, they come and go by way of a rope ladder, a knotted rope or a cable. A dishpan, pressed into service as a dumbwaiter, delivers such essentials as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to the heights.
On the redwood-sided top level, a garden hose connects to a small stainless steel sink, and a metal weathervane and chimes catch every wind movement. Wooden double doors (”Inspired by Captain Kangaroo,” said Fritz)
open to the rope ladder, and part of the view is through a stained-glass window from Fritz` childhood church and gothic windows from the family home of his wife, Doreen.
”Sometimes we sleep overnight in it,” said Katie, ”and that`s fun, when it`s dark.”
”If it`s a windy night,” said Fritz, ”you know how an old ship creaks from the wood grinding? That`s the feeling up there; it`s really neat.”
Rick Gluth loved similar sounds in his treehouse: ”It`s the most peaceful sound ever, exactly like a wood-masted sailboat. You could just lie on your back up there, look at the sky, listen to this thing creak. The squirrels would come up and eat nuts out of your hand. There was no better place to see the sunset.”
The Fritz treehouse is five years old, but far from completed, to judge from the length of the family`s must-do list. ”There are constant
adjustments,” said Fritz. ”I need to fix the double doors and the balance on the trapdoor magnet. We`re going to make a water slide from the first level and a crow`s nest on top with a cupola and a periscope. The tree is now in its last stages; someone from the Morton Arboretum advised us to strip the bark and coat it with polyurethane. And then Lee wants me to enclose the bottom level . . . .” The list goes on.
Katie Fritz stopped in her tour of the treehouse to ponder a question:
When you`ve grown up and moved to your own house, do you think your dad will still be playing in this treehouse?
”Probably,” she said emphatically.
”And will you build a treehouse where you live?” asked her father.
”I probably will.”
Her mother agreed that treehouse fever appears to run in families, but Doreen Fritz added, ”Friends catch it from each other, too.”
For those who have caught the fever, the best treehouse is the next one. Big old trees are scarce in Rick Gluth`s part of southern California, but he has a plan: ”We planted a eucalyptus. They grow unbelievably fast here, 12 to 15 feet a year. It won`t be that long.”
Larry Koch, when asked about his plans for future treehouses, gave mixed signals: ”I saw some really great hills out near Galena. That would be a great place to build a treehouse, but boy, now that we`re saner and older, with more construction experience . . . I don`t know that I`d want to put too much investment up in a tree.”
Does that mean that when Gluth`s eucalyptus tops out to treehouse height, he will have to build Warrenville II without help from his Du Page buddies?
”I`d help Rick; I`d do that. I would actually like to do that again,”
said Koch.
”I suspect we`ll end up out there some day, Toby and me, and we`ll all go do another crazy project. If there aren`t any trees tall enough in southern California to justify a treehouse, maybe something else.”
