Featured in The Times, by Katrina Burroughs.

The Best Children’s Playgrounds, The Times Luxury, Luxx Article

Sometimes it takes something more than the lure of a gambol in the fresh air to separate children from their iPads. Something like, for instance, a slide inside a fire-breathing dragon. Henry Durham is the creator of this Chinese dragon, designed for a treehouse in the garden of an Oxford couple with two children. It is no normal slide. To make it, Durham encased the stainless-steel slide in a timber body covered in cedar shingle “scales” that ends in a wooden serpent head, out of which a machine shoots smoke as red lights flash, “like he’s breathing fire”.

Durham, the founder of High Life Treehouses, whose creations can cost more than £150,000, admits that some of his treehouses are more like mini sculpture parks or glampsites. Most, he adds, have electric lighting, “which comes on with a movement sensor, so as you approach it all lights up, with spotlights up the stairs. It’s quite a sight.”

Durham is not alone in creating extravagant outdoor play areas for British clients. Joe Cooper of TouchWood Play, whose projects cost on average about £180,000, has been working on one in the southeast, with Capability Brown grounds featuring “glacial boulders from Wales, some of them weighing up to three tonnes”. He’s brought in a sand pit, trampoline, swings and a climbing frame, as well as a spectacular fountain system that doubles as a water play feature.

Playgrounds by Paul Cameron of Treehouse Life, a session drummer who has segued into treehouse design, include zipwires, cargo nets and the longest rope bridge in the UK. “But our belief is that this is only part of the story,” he says of his adventure playgrounds that can cost up to £150,000. “Our ‘slow-play’ approach recognises that kids need space to think, reflect and dream.”

In one of his projects in Italy, in a garden just across the border from Monaco, he “suspended a floating treehouse between two trees, with a series of nine or ten play decks that spiralled up around one trunk, like a spiral staircase”, so children could look out over Monaco from one side and the Alps from the other. Another of his commissions, for a Lake Como house owned by a British-Russian tech billionaire, included “an Indiana Jones rope bridge right across a gorge and waterfall. It was an impossible location really, but that is something we are good at.”

Back in the English countryside, demand for beautifully designed private playgrounds is on the rise, according to Harry Gladwin, the head of The Buying Solution agency in the Cotswolds — “particularly those with sustainable, wooden structures. A recent client bought a house with the aim of turning their grounds into a playground that blended seamlessly into the wooded landscape. He is having a bespoke treehouse built around one big oak tree, with turrets in other trees and rope bridges going between them for the kids to have as a Robin Hood-esque play area.”

The return of playgrounds, Gladwin believes, is related to the rebalancing of town and country life after Covid. “A lot of people are moving to the countryside without a great network of family. They want to meet new people quickly and to invite friends round, and you can be the most popular kid in school straight away if you have an unbelievably cool playground.”

For those who crave cool, Blue Forest is another option. Its extraordinary complexes are “not really treehouses, more like tree mansions”, says the managing director, Andy Payne, of the extravaganzas he builds costing £250,000. “We’ve done a James Bond treehouse with night-vision CCTV cameras and biometric thumb locks on the doors; a Narnia-themed complex in which kids had to push through the fur coats in the wardrobe to get to a slide”; and also a castle with hidden tunnels and passages and rooms. “One we did,” he adds, “had a secret bookcase door, which was operated by pulling a book forward, which opened up into the Nerf gun armoury.” And we thought a dragon slide was wild.