Jim Henry wanted something more from his wooded half-acre property in Lewes—more than the roomy, cedarsided ranch he purchased in 1991, which evokes the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Born and raised in West Virginia, Henry earned his undergraduate degree in architecture from Princeton. But he never practiced until a treehouse became his personal project in 2004.
“When some land behind me became protected, some friends gave me do-it-yourself treehouse books, so I decided to build a treehouse with a teahouse look,” Henry says. He formed a grid with a few old telephone poles and reached out to a local welder to fashion brackets that would hold beams to support the structure. Henry designed his lair to feature a 16-foot-by-20-foot floating deck.
“I wanted to emulate Japanese architecture, so instead of using standard beam-and-post, I used four-by-fours both for posts and beams—and put them together the way the Japanese would,” he explains. He also designed a roofline in the Shinto style. Frank Lloyd Wright, he notes, “was also enormously influenced by the Japanese, so it all fits together.”
At roughly 300 square feet, the treehouse is Henry’s rustic sanctuary from late May until November. Though it lacks modern conveniences (there is no kitchen), the space is idyllic—and difficult to leave. “I’m up there every night to sleep,” he says. “I sleep there long after I can see my breath. When it drops below 40 degrees, that sends me back into the main house.”
The treehouse is almost completely screened in, so it has a wall-less flavor, where inside and outside merge. The morning sun, which would otherwise come streaming in, right onto the queen-sized bed, is deflected by a pair of retractable, slatted wooden panels, as Henry explains, with a reference to the architectural great Le Corbusier: “They’re what Le Corbusier would call brise-soleil—something that breaks the sun.”
Most of the interior wood is cedar, with atmospheric rafters. The sitting room is positioned opposite the bed, with several pieces representing the 10 years Henry spent teaching writing at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, including some armchairs and a koa wood sideboard. (The flowering koa tree is ubiquitous in Hawaii.) But one of the house’s most unique features, the bed’s headboard, harkens back to Japan. The piece was actually a transom that Henry discovered in a used furniture store in Tokyo.
“It was quite the production to get it packaged and…bring it back on the plane, because of its size,” he remembers. “I had it sitting here for the longest time, not knowing what I was going to do with it, and then I realized it would make the perfect headboard. Remarkably, it was just the right size for a queen bed. Quite the coincidence.” Henry says it took “quite a long time” to find the perfect rattan ceiling fan, which now rotates overhead.
“The Shinto architecture, above all, inspires me,” he says. “A lot of Japanese are Buddhists, but the Shinto religion actually predates Buddhism.” (Henry is a practicing Buddhist.) “It reveres nature [and] actually identifies spirits in objects that we might not think have spirits, such as stones and trees. They have very unique temples that, unlike some of the Buddhist temples that we’re more familiar with, have pointed roofs, often thatched, with elaborate wood architecture.” During a three-week trip to Japan, Henry explored temples, “photographing them, sketching them, and honoring the architecture.”
The treehouse requires attention; it’s not that the structure is a work in progress, but “the main endeavor is upkeep,” Henry says. “Things fall apart. It’s aging, like me. I don’t really anticipate anything else happening [to alter the look of the hideaway]. It’s just a really wonderful space to inhabit for sitting, reading, writing, or thinking.”
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