Meet Foster Huntington from New York who wasn’t too thrilled with his career in fashion, a high-flying career it is! He decided to go all ‘Into The Wild’ on his life. He is the current internet sensation because of his amazingly unique feat. He built two treehouses that are connected via swinging rope-bridge in southwest Washington State.
How does a guy just leave the fashion career and ends up building two awesome treehouses? Let’s go back into 2011 when it all happened. Foster quit his job at Ralph Lauren, sold all of his belongings, and moved to a mobile van that he inhabited for a couple of months. At the time of quitting his job, he was working as men’s fashion designer. Soon he realized that he wasn’t that passionate about clothing. He says,
“I remember looking at photos of bush pilots in Alaska and their ruggedly stylish world and thinking: ‘I can take photos. I don’t want to live my life in the city. I want to go do something else.”
Our hero of the story then followed up on photography for a while and made some money by creating photo books. Fast forward to 2014 when he decided to spend his time by making his childhood dream a reality; creating an amazing tree house!
He gathered all of his life savings and managed to get a few friends on board to start working on the project. It was to be executed on his family’s property in Skamania, Washington. He recalls,
“I’d saved money and I’d always wanted to build a treehouse and decided just to do it. We’d always go to my family’s property and camp and it has great trees and was kind of just begging for a treehouse. I called up one of my best friends from college who is a carpenter and designer and we started scheming and planning.”
The dynamic duo reached out to other friends and finally had a group of 20 people working on the project. Foster says that they didn’t have a concrete plan but rather made it up as they went along with it. He says that it was the most exciting part of this project; the constant problem-solving experience!
Finally, the team was able to build two wonderful houses that overlook a skate bowl and a soothing hot tub. Both of the houses occupy under 200 square feet and feature heights of 20’ and 30’ above the ground. The team used reclaimed Douglas fir along with western red cedar to create the amazing houses.
Foster is now living and working out of these amazing creations. The house named as ‘Octagon’ serves as his bedroom while the other one is being used by him as his studio. A small house that was built by his mother about 30 meters away is his source of plumbing and electricity.
Foster is now working on a photo book known as ‘The Cinder Cone’ that entails the project and completed a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter, amassing almost $80,000. The campaign page read,
“My goal is to make something that shows the process from dreaming up a seemingly outlandish idea to the final result after thousands of hours of hard work and the moments that happened in between. I hope that the result ignites the imagination of people’s inner kid and gets ideas going for their own projects.”
Will you ever do this? What are your views about this crazy yet creative man? Comment below!
Images via Pinterest