Bea’s Treehouse begins as a battered student model rediscovered in an attic and becomes the architectural project through which Bea tries to recover her creative purpose. Conceived as a wooden refuge among the branches of a chestnut, it is at once a carefully imagined, twenty-square-metre dwelling and an alternative to architecture measured only by scale or prestige. Its construction draws Bea and her family into collective work; the felling of the chosen tree then makes the unfinished house a physical casualty of the dispute over the grove.

Origin and Design

Bea finds the model while searching through the attic for work that might represent her better than the poor project she had considered showing Ingrid. Of the three battered models she uncovers, two disappoint her, but the last one still feels alive with possibility. She recognizes in it the beginning of her desire to design buildings: not simply to produce professional work, but to make places that move people and make the world, or at least one small part of it, more beautiful.

The design is a timber house raised in a chestnut tree, with oak wood forming the dwelling and the living tree providing its support. Its twenty square metres are arranged to feel welcoming and to make unusually efficient use of space. A wide lookout and skylight open the compact interior to its surroundings; a bed, table, and even a shower fit inside. A low terrace extends the house outward, offering a place to sit in the spring sun or dance in autumn rain. The design’s appeal lies in the combination of shelter and exposure: it offers refuge from ordinary troubles without severing its occupant from the changing tree and landscape.

The model recalls the pleasure Bea took in designing it and the years she spent imagining that she might build it for real. Rediscovering it makes the distance between that early enthusiasm and her workaday architectural life newly apparent. She decides that the idea matters even if it brings no prize. In the argument she forms around it, architecture need not be monumental, masculine, or governed by one supposedly correct approach; it can be smaller and more human, and still be serious. After Ingrid has rejected her, Bea tells her family she will build the house herself, improved from the model.

Choosing the Tree and Preparing to Build

Bea visits a group of six chestnuts and finds that three are rotten and dead. She selects the best of the remaining trees: a century-old chestnut with an exceptionally broad trunk and five sturdy branches extending almost horizontally. The site makes the model’s arrangement feasible, while the mature tree gives Bea the prospect of placing the house among its branches and looking out over the landscape. She takes photographs and measurements, expecting to complete the plans in a week. Her excitement is so visible that her brother-in-law notices it; Bea describes the future house as something that will help heal her.

For the build, Bea loads her mother’s old van with tools gathered from the family garage and additional equipment she has bought: a circular saw, compressor, toolbox, chainsaw, electric hammer, wood glues, trestles, ladders, and materials for a small scaffold. Her parents’ furniture-restoration hobby has given her practical do-it-yourself knowledge, and she supplements the plans with a three-dimensional model on her laptop and notes about similar projects found online. She feels ready to turn an architectural idea into something tangible with her own hands. The prospect of help from nearly all her family adds another hope to the project: that working together might bring them closer and help mend their hurts.

The work begins with a logistical problem. The timber lorry can reach only the nearest forest track, leaving the pine boards roughly three hundred metres from the selected chestnut. The carrier will not haul them farther, so Jacobo has arranged for three colleagues from the Civil Guard to help. León, Jacobo, the sawmill employee, and the officers carry the boards to the tree; by the end of the morning, the lumber is stacked at the site. The effort is exhausting, and the first day ends before construction has properly begun.

Interrupted Construction and the Felled Grove

Bea’s expectations of a large family work party meet the limits of everyone’s circumstances. Juan does not come to help, apparently unwilling to encounter Débora, and Débora stays away as well. Jacobo has to limit the hours he can take from his Civil Guard work, while Fin attends classes in the morning. For much of the time, Bea and León are left working alone, too few people for the amount of labor required. After two days, only part of the base has been raised.

A spring downpour forces them to cover the timber with tarpaulins and plastic. Rain continues for more than three days, and Bea watches the weather forecast while waiting to return to the site. With only a partial base in place, she estimates that even an optimistic schedule would leave eight or nine weeks of work. The delay makes the project’s dependence on weather, labor, and the survival of the tree plain: this is not a finished refuge but a vulnerable construction whose progress can be stopped from outside.

That vulnerability becomes decisive when the chestnuts are cut down. Bea arrives to find the trees lying on the ground, including the century-old tree she chose for the house. Although only a few days of work had been completed, the loss feels to her like the destruction of the finished building. She had invested hope in the project during the weeks after her cancelled wedding, and the felled tree seems to take away the one thing that had helped her recover some enthusiasm. In the aftermath, family members are in a Civil Guard van, while León protests furiously and Jacobo stands apart, visibly torn between anger, embarrassment, and distress. The conflict over the grove therefore reaches beyond a construction delay: it destroys the living support of Bea’s design and places the family’s protest in direct contact with law enforcement.

Conflict, Reappearance, and Meaning

The treehouse also becomes part of the public account of the grove dispute. Rebeca tells Bea that she knows about the chestnuts, the house, and the arrests, presenting the incident as an attempt to stop the factory’s workers from destroying the house and asking why the mayor tried to conceal it. Bea objects that this account exaggerates what happened. The competing descriptions make the treehouse more than a private architectural undertaking: it becomes evidence in a wider argument over what was done to the trees and how the authorities handled the protest.

The structure remains present later as a recognizable work in progress. When Víctor climbs its stairs during a confrontation at the site, he uses the opportunity to praise Bea’s design and its efficient use of space. Bea, in turn, insists that it is her treehouse. The exchange sets the building’s practical form against the personal struggle unfolding around it: even amid conflict, its design can be seen and valued, while its ownership and meaning remain emphatically Bea’s.

Across these episodes, the treehouse joins architectural practice to a particular sense of place. Its intended shelter depends on a living chestnut, and that dependence makes the tree impossible to treat as interchangeable scenery. The house gives material form to Bea’s wish for a smaller, more humane architecture, while the felling of the tree exposes how fragile that wish is when the landscape becomes contested. In the narrative, the project is at once a return to an abandoned ambition, an attempt to make and repair things through family labor, and a site where those hopes encounter irreversible loss.