At Mangaluru’s Varanashi Organic Farm, the first thing you notice about the treehouse is not its height, but the ambient sound. Seen from its balcony, nearly 50 ft above the ground, the farm falls away into a dense sweep of trees, palms and undergrowth. There is no road noise, no neighbouring building, no sense of the world pressing in; only green.
The room of the structure that is ensconced in the spreading branches of a rain tree, has a king-size bed, a work desk and a washroom; all under one canopy. Step outside and a wooden balcony opens towards a sacred grove. Flying squirrels move between trees. Small birds flit through the foliage. Even monkeys appear occasionally, watching their human neighbours with greater curiosity.
What is striking is what you don’t see. No stilts support the structure. The effect is almost dreamlike: less a cabin suspended in a tree than a room the tree has gradually swallowed. “The platform is secured to the tree, and the room has been built into its branches, designed to allow the tree to grow into it.” says Partha Varanasi, a ninth-generation farmer who runs the farm.
Varanasi had thought of making something like it when he was just a child. “I grew up reading comics,” he recalls. The image of treehouses inhabited by comic-book characters stayed with him long after he had grown up. Years later, while studying agricultural molecular biology in Australia, he encountered a kindred idea—people coming together to plant trees, restore land and reconnect with nature. When he returned to the family farm in Karnataka, the two ideas found each other.
Varansi’s first attempt at building a treehouse was in 2012. He gathered local workers and built one. It looked good enough, he thought, until the monsoon arrived. Heavy rain came in through the cracks into the structure, leaving the guests and their belongings wet. The experiment could have ended there. Instead, the visitors told Varanasi how to contact Philipp Klingspies, founder of the Treehouse Community. Three years later, with the help of the Treehouse Community, the present house took shape.
Nearly 50 feet above the ground, the farm falls away into a dense sweep of trees, palms and undergrowth. There is no road noise, no neighbouring building, no sense of the world pressing in. Only green
The view here changes with the seasons. In summer, the canopy catches the late sunlight and birds become constant companions. Before the monsoon, fireflies flit around as evening settles in: tiny points of light blinking among the foliage. Between July and November, the monsoon transform the landscape: a natural pond fills up and a small waterfall appears, reshaping the forest as something louder, wetter and alive.
According to its founder, living in the treehouse is “a healing experience”. However, for visitors accustomed to sealed, climate-controlled hotel rooms, living in a tree could take time to get used to. Varanasi’s solution is not sanitising the experience but to explain it. Its luxury lies in proximity.
Guests and volunteers therefore encounter the farm on its own terms. They can take part in workshops and camps around farming, nature and wellness. The treehouse does not offer the polished insulation of conventional luxury. Its pleasures are more elemental: waking to birds instead of an alarm, watching a monkey move through the branches, hearing rain arrive on the roof, standing on the balcony as twinkling blue lights puncture the dusk.
A childhood image from a comic book has become a working experiment in hospitality—one in which the architecture is deliberately subordinate to the living thing around it.
This is not a simple trick treehouse to look out at nature and sit back. You climb into the tree and let nature come to you.