Another Treehouse...

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Text by Alex Marashian   Photos by Rainer Hosch

Another Treehouse....

Walking down the beach one morning early, we spot a massive treehouse, its top floor peeking out of the surrounding canopy of palms. Coming closer to inspect, we’re amazed by the complexity of the construction. Giant lengths of tree, as smooth and shapely as driftwood, have been fitted together with such care that, on first glance, they seem to be part of a single, organic whole growing right out of the sandy beach.

At Team DEDON, we’ve had a bit of an obsession with tree houses over the last year, as our “Coming Home” image campaign, film and book, all shot by Bruce Weber, will attest. And as we admire the complex construction towering over us now, still very much a work in progress, we can’t help but wonder who’s behind it — and what he or she intends to do with it. A few inquiries later, we have an appointment with owner, who’s arriving in Tulum the next morning.

It’s hard to picture Michael Venditto as the burned-out Boston businessman he says he was just a few years ago. Tanned and toned, his long curly hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, the man who joins us for breakfast at Coquí Coquí seems to be the embodiment of the positive and, for lack of a better word, New Age energy we’ve been sensing in Tulum. Over the course of an hour or so, he talks frankly about the personal and spiritual journey that brought him here. Then we visit the treehouse.

Michael — who still lives part time in Boston, where nowadays he’s the partner in two yoga studios — originally purchased beachfront land in Tulum in order to create a yoga retreat. But the idea, like Michael himself, seems to have evolved quite a bit over the last two years. As it’s now conceived, the land will be a holistic healing center, complete with a small permaculture farm growing at the back. Eventually, it will become just a part a much bigger project involving 240 hectares of inland jungle purchased more recently.

As we tour the raised, two-story structure (not technically a treehouse, but we like calling it one) that first caught our attention from the beach, Michael explains that it has been built almost entirely from dead wood — usually trees felled by hurricane — which his builders find in the jungle. Numerology and sacred geometry have both influenced the structure’s complex design, but what mainly impresses me is the element of chance: The look and feel of the structure depend on the random pieces of wood that Michael and his builders salvage, and the surprising ways they fit them together. Overall, the effect is not quite like anything else I’ve seen.