Stepped Terrace campus style

I did this terrace for a neighbour. She had photographs of a terrace on a university campus in the USA and liked it. In her garden was a small steep slope perfect for situating this kind of stepped terrace. Even so, there was a lot of hard digging work!

 The original concrete steps stayed in place, so I had to design the terrace around that.

There were a couple of design features. This is a 'table' area to lay out your picnic!

The devil is in the details. The slatted design for the verticals was a lot of work, I had to split the 2x4 planks into two, but the finished look is very sophisticated. Oops there is some warping going on there! maybe I'll replace one or two of those laths.

A very important safety feature: the tread of the steps had to be wide enough, or you find yourself stepping over the edge and risking a fall. I reduced the depth of the table area so that the step below was deeper.
You can see the second design feature here: the third step up is deeper on the far side at 80cm. This is the sunbathing platform!

As the terrace was on a slope I decided to use pile foundations. I drove twelve of these 3x3 posts deep into the ground. The end result is extremely solid; the terrace makes no noise when you walk on it, there is literally no bounce.

The frame almost complete, using 5x2 treated wood.

I added angular struts (not shown in the pictures) under the frame to triangulate the whole structure. This gave a lot of extra rigidity.

Treehouse revisited

After a 30 year break, a chance to build another treehouse! First job was to choose the place. It was decided to use three trees, which presented a challenge. It would have to be flexible enough to accomodate for the threes moving independantly. I decided to use a clamping mechanism:

The spot. Not a bad place!

The working platform

One of the clamps

The deck nearing completion

The design of the house evolved naturally. The two large pines were quite close together, so I hit on the idea of a T-shape for the frame.

The perfect shape!

For the cladding we chose thick rough sawn boards of Aspen. It is very light and easy to work, and it weathers quickly to a beautiful silver gray.

The finished article, including happy customer!

Some details, including the great view through antique windows.