Treehotel: Recline in Pine

Sweden’s dense boreal forest has a new addition to its mass of 140-year-old pines: seven beautifully incongruous structures that that constitute Treehotel, an innovative project conceived by husband and wife team Britta Jonsson-Lindvall and Kent Lindvall. Treehotel was inspired by Swedish indie director Jonas Selberg Augustsén’s 2008 eco-documentary Trädälskaren (the Tree Lover), which followed a group of friends who break free from their mundane jobs and take to the woods, building their own tree house home. The Lindvalls’ forest dwellings are far from textbook in style—you'd be forgiven for mistaking "The Mirror Cube," for example, for a minor work of conceptual art—and have been created by some of Sweden’s most cutting-edge architects, including Bertil Harström (winner of the Excellent Swedish Design Award) and Tham & Videgård (the firm behind the Kalmar Museum of Art). The seven room-size dwellings also include “The Bird’s Nest,” a circular pod covered in twisted branches, and “The Blue Cone,” a miniaturized house with a pitched roof that appears to be built entirely of Lego. Each house is powered by sustainable electricity and is attached to its respective tree via a metal clamp (adjustable to fit the tree as it continues to grow) rather than with screws and nails. To document these serene perches, NOWNESS asked photographer Elizabeth Toll to venture into the forest.