Inside the Cotswolds’ new luxury treehouses

There is certainly something calming about being among the trees, but it also feels nostalgic. Liz Marot, part of the front of (tree) house team who welcomes me and my 10-year-old daughter Jemima, tells us that the couple in the next treehouse will be getting married there next year. What is it, I wonder, that makes treehouses so appealing to us grown-ups these days? Are we all desperate to escape the pressures of 21st-century life? Is it some sort of atavistic impulse which harks back to our tree-dwelling ancestors? 

Or maybe, in this case, it’s because Jeremy Clarkson’s new boozer, The Farmer’s Dog, is just up the road. “Lots of the guests we’ve had in the last few weeks are in their 20s and have come here specifically to visit Diddly Squat Farm Shop (run by Clarkson),” Marot tells us. 

Other nearby lures include The Bull, a highly rated and recently refurbished pub in Charlbury, the once sleepy town that’s fast becoming Notting Hill-on-the-Wolds. Then there’s Blenheim Palace and Soho Farmhouse, while Cornbury Park hosts the Wilderness Festival, which brings around 10,000 revellers to the estate each summer. 

On arrival, my daughter and I certainly feel the sense of wonder that Rees, who spent over eight years living in a yurt in Pembrokeshire, is trying to create. When I first tell Jemima that we are spending the night in a treehouse, she asks if it will be like a (deeply underwhelming) shepherd’s hut we stayed at in Dorset the previous summer. But opening the door to our lodging, Camellia, to find a little wood burner, a fully-fitted kitchen and light streaming through the windows, makes it feel like a rustic chic Scandi sanctuary.