Broken Hallelujah

The Life Of Roderick Romero

Roderick Romero has a boyish face and a sideways grin. He wears his hair in reddish-brown braids that fall to his waist (it was last cut in 1990, when he took a Swiss army knife to it in the middle of a concert he was performing with his band, Sky Cries Mary.) His strong forearms are covered in tattoos of voodoo and Santeria symbols and illustrations from the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore's firefly poems. While he has been many thing -- rock star, yogi, premed student, aspiring tennis pro -- his current incarnation may be the most unlikely: His is a tree house designer, and his growing list of clients includes Sting, Donna Karan, Val Kilmer, and Julianne Moore.

This new career began in 1998, when a friend asked him to contribute an art piece to an outdoor exhibition she was curating in Bald Hills, Washington. "I told her I would build this big nest," Romero says, "and you could sleep in it." He had no idea he would tap into a national fascination with tree houses.

For the next nine months, Romero was firmly steeped in the world of his nest. Like a bird, ne gathered fallen twigs and reeds and vines from nearby trees and then had to figure out how to build something structurally sound, sustained at 30 feet off the ground. "It was coming straight out of the ether," he says. "I had no idea what I was doing. It was purely conceptual, but it had to be engineered well. It had to be safe." The result was a creation that looks sort of like a bearded bungalow perched among the branches of a giant leaf maple.

When his brother saw the nest, he requested one, so Romero built him the Eagle House, a pine and cedar trapezoid that straddles four trees in the Cascade Mountains. A few months later, Romero was visiting Sting and his wife, Trudy, at their home in Tuscany (Romero knows them through the yoga world). He told them about his first two tree houses, at which point Trudie asked, "Why don't you build us a tree house?" And so came tree house No.3.

For more information on the treehouses, Click Here.

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