A Pub in a Tree

From a Tree in a Pub to . . .

I suppose if there’s anything more hobbit-like than a tree inside a pub it would have to be a pub inside a tree.

The Big Baobab (alas no more) was a pub in the hollow trunk of a 72-ft baobab tree in Modjadjiskloof, South Africa. The bar seated around 15 people and boasted electric light, a phone, and a dart board. According to carbon dating, the tree was well over 1,000 years old when it split and collapsed in 2017. It is thought to have been inhabited by humans – mostly bushmen, but also the odd Voortrekker – for much of its life.

Or if you want to eat and don’t mind Japanese, how about this?

The Gajumaru Restaurant in Naha is one of the landmarks of modern Okinawa, a diner perched some 20 feet up in a massive banyan tree. If you don’t fancy the stairs, there’s a lift inside the trunk; once at the top, you are promised views across the harbour and no lack of ‘organically harvested’ seafood.

‘Gajumaru’ is the Okinawan name for the banyans that proliferate on the island and which are traditionally held to be sacred. According to local folklore, they are inhabited by mischievous flame-haired spirits known as kijimuna, who eat fish eyes and delight in stealing the fire from paper lanterns. Alas, the gajumaru under the diner is in fact a concrete replica – so I fear no kijimuna.

Sushi not your thing? Then how about this, the Yellow Treehouse Restaurant in New Zealand: the precise location is something of a secret – book a table and they’ll send you a map – but it’s somewhere deep in the forests north of Auckland.

The restaurant hovers 30 feet off the ground in a giant redwood, with access via a lengthy tree-top walkway. Its stunningly elegant design has been compared to a whole range of organic forms – a conch, a chrysalis, an onion bulb.

By a strange quirk, the restaurant came into being as part of a publicity campaign by Yellow Pages, the object being to show how even the most outlandish project could be realized through the directory. The architects, Pacific Environment, were found through its pages, as were all the builders, suppliers, and other service providers.

If you need a bed for the night, there’s always this place: Treehotel Harads in northern Sweden.

Treehotel is said to have been inspired by a Swedish film called The Tree Lover, the true story of three urban types who try to get back to their roots by building a house-sized tree-house in the wild. The hotel consists of five ‘tree-rooms’, all stuck 20 feet up in the pines but each built to a radically different spec by a different team of architects. The one pictured here is the so-called ‘Mirrorcube’, a room that is almost entirely hidden by mirrored walls that reflect its woodland surroundings. For a harmony of inside and out, a fluid play of interiors and exteriors you could hardly do better than this. And you needn’t worry about the birds either: the walls have been treated with some infrared stuff, visible to them but not to us.

This being Sweden, there is also a tree-top sauna seating up to twelve people.

First published on the Dabbler in 2012 as Part 2 of a short series on trees in houses, houses in trees, and several things adjacent or in between. The other parts are: 1. A Tree in a Pub; 3. Henry Hastings, the Dorset Woodwose; 4. The Secret Nests of the Poets; and 5. Deakin’s Dome.

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in my ebook The Whartons of Winchendon —a short study of one of the strangest families in English history, featuring incest, treason, deep-sea diving, fairies, and the self-proclaimed Solar King of the World.