My friends and I built ours in Pete’s backyard. His property was at his folk’s house with 8 acres of woods in Stow, Ohio.
It had 2 rooms and patio! A trap-door to the roof and it stretched between 5 trees!
Of course, it was badly designed and poorly constructed but by God we built it!
Anyone else?
We had one in a big eucalyptus in San Diego. It was in an open field across the street and was a home base of sorts for our lizard hunting expeditions in the outlying canyons and mesas. Then the developers came along and built houses over the whole area. 
I had to settle for the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse in Disneyland after that.
Whoo! YES! Lang and lang ago, and, yeah, my dad did most of the hard work. But it was a beaut. Just a high, flat platform, with railing around the sides. Lower in the same tree there was a barrel-stave hammock. All way up in a big California Oak. Years later, we decided the structures were eye-sores, and took 'em down again.
The same tree almost got it in the “Witch Creek Fire” of '07; was severely singed. Now, it is totally colonized by tree ants. (“Piss ants” in the local jargon, sometimes euphemistically called “vinegar ants.”)
My family has a pretty good sized piece of property and my brother and I ended up building two tree houses. Nothing as elaborate as the OP described. Our tree houses were mainly a ladder and a floor.
Several of the neighborhood kids and I built a massive structure about 50 feet up in an oak tree. One of the guys’ father owned a lumberyard and we were free to take all the scrap we wanted.
It took several months to complete, but when it was finished it was three levels with two trapdoors and an emergency exit down a cable and tricycle wheel thing that never quite killed anyone. It lasted for two or three years until the cable TV company came in and tore it down.
I built one, with childhood friends, in a giant oak tree. As I was a youngster then, I can see how my experience may seem dubious. But I did. Yes I did.
Wow, great stories. Do kids still build treehouses with scrap lumber? Or do they just have dad buy a kit from Home Depot?
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing bad about a professional playhouse (safety!) but you really experience a sense of accomplishment when it is just you and the gang.
I did, in the nearby forest (in fact, it was all forest anyway). Hmm…scratch that. My older brothers did. I probably cut/brought some pieces of wood, and they pretended I was helping. My father helped to, and we pretended he didn’t.
It was destroyed several years later by some friends of mine just to piss me off. Morons.
My grandpa, a die and tool maker, built me one. Suffice to say, the craftsmanship was better than anything i could have done. It was pretty damn amazing; plexiglass skylights, and he even spray painted it in an army camo. 
Cool!
Some friends.
:rolleyes:
Between my 8th and 13th years in 70s my family lived in a home whose backyard was a small former rock quarry with a total area of about 1 acre. It had a sloping ramp going down and steep sides of about 10 to 12 feet around most of it. When I was about 10 I asked my Dad if we could build a tree-house and he brought home a load of scrap lumber and gave me a hammer.
My friends and I chose a live oak tree near one of the steeper sides and began building a monstrosity of a tree house. It was basically multiple platforms connected by “walkways” with a ramp leading to the cliff. For a couple of years it was under continuous construction as we improved, expanded, rebuilt, and otherwise played dangerously 20 to 25 feet off the ground. I am sure there was a smashed thumb or two but otherwise no real injuries. God we had fun.
We had a similar structure in a huge oak tree at my grandmother’s farm as well that we built with our cousins. So we had a city tree house and a country tree house.
Guess the 70s lasted longer for some than others.
When I was in Jr. High we built one in the woodlot behind my house. It was probably 30 feet up in a Hackberry or Sycamore I imagine and really was just a big platform. Thankfully my friends knew more about carpentry at the time, otherwise it might have been mentioned in an obituary. I was where I got my first kiss from Mary Jane, further exacerbating the harrowing steps down.
Someone here (board) builds nice, high end treehouses as an adult. Dinsdale perhaps? Or someone with a P… Philster, can’t remember.
When I moved to our new house at age 12, I went exploring our 10 acre property. I found a small treehouse that was locked with a cable and padlock! As I eventually met the kids in the neighborhood, I learned it was theirs. Being a gung-ho builder with lots of lumber, I suggested we make it bigger. We ended up with a 3 story, 3 bedroom carpeted behemoth with built in seating, balcony, beds and electricity. We must have used about 9 extension cords from the nearest house to power some lights.
Perfect place to keep purloined adult magazines and for the first fumblings of young lovers…
Good times.
Yeah, we found a stack of old Playboys and kept them there.
We built one at my dad’s house in rural CT which had a lot of woods out back. Dad did most of the work. It was a simple flat platform about 10x10 feet, with railings around the side, about 20 feet high. It was supported by two massive 45-degree 2x8 beams that were bolted into the trunk at right angles to each other, and the trunk came up through a hole in the platform. The cool feature was that we put the ladder on hinges, with a rope and pulley attached to a branch, so treehouse-dwellers could raise the ladder like a drawbridge and prevent landlubbers from getting up there.
For a time we also made an ad-hoc tent structure by suspending a tarp from one of the higher branches, but that didn’t last long. There was some talk of building another level on an adjacent tree, but we never did it.
Eventually the structure deteriorated and the railings and ladder fell off, then they sold the property and I don’t know what became of it.
Dammit. I’ve resisted posting this about a dozen times now, but I’m just going to go ahead and say it.
Every. Single. Time I scroll past this thread, my brain interprets the barely-seen title as “Who Here Has Had A Threesome?” Every time. Even though I’ve slowed down and clarified it in my head over and over now. It’s driving me nuts.
I just finished building one for my kids a couple of weeks back. They had helped me build the chicken coop and then a deck this summer and they kept asking for one so I finally put it up over the course of a couple of weeks. Unfortunately we didn’t have a suitable tree so it is just on stilts up under a fir’s overhanging branches. The platform is about 9-11 feet off the ground depending on which corner you measure and a roof (clear plastic) is about 3-5 feet over the platform.
We always had our clubhouses on roofs (mostly garages) growing up so I didn’t have much experience other than tree climbing. However, there were 12 kids up in it during the neighborhood picnic this weekend and it seems quite sturdy so it should be there until they head off to college 
They enjoy it so far, but now they want more substantial walls for privacy- I said to just use cardboard boxes as the open walls (with green stained 2x4s) makes it far more invisible to the public than a true treehouse.
They have already personalized it with pulleys and hammock hooks for hauling “stuff” up and for relaxing, respectively.
I also built a 7’ platform for my stepsons in our backyard while I was married.
They used it to sneak ciggarettes, as they should have.