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Jimmy and Sandy Martin live in a 4,000-square-foot McMansion off Inwood Road in Bluffview. Architecturally, it’s completely unremarkable. The home they recently built in Central Texas, on the other hand, is much more interesting: It’s a 75,000-pound treehouse.
The structure, perched on an isolated clump of trees on their ranch outside Waco, is the subject of tomorrow’s debut episode of Animal Planet’s Treehouse Masters. The show follows Pete Nelson and his “family of traveling treehouse builders” as they criss-cross the country, building ridiculously ornate treehouses.
“The energy that a tree emits is undeniable,” Nelson tells the camera in a preview for the show. “It’s the kind of energy where the small hairs start to stand up a little bit, and I know that trees are beings, and they’ve got something to give us as we have something to give them.”
That doesn’t explain how a show about treehouses wound up on Animal Planet. It also doesn’t explain why anyone spends hundreds of thousands of dollars building structures that used to be the exclusive domain of children.
But such questions aren’t terribly important in the grand scheme of things. Not when you have a treehouse like the Martins’ featuring a “Texas exterior and a contemporary and luxurious interior complete with a full bathroom, a kitchen with top-of-the-line appliances and a flat-screen television, where the entire family can gather together,” according to the press release.
