Mahinui Na Lani
A Treehouse in the Clouds — Volcano, Hawaiʻi
Four thousand feet up the slope of Kīlauea, in a cloud forest of old-growth ʻōhia, there is a treehouse that became famous before most people ever knew the name of the man who built it.
It was called Mahinui Na Lani — perched above a lava tube, suspended in the canopy, off the grid in every sense of the word. MTV found it. Entertainment Tonight found it. Ellen DeGeneres sent her team to film it. But the people who actually built it worked in near-total obscurity, five thousand miles from the cameras, for eight months, by hand.
I was one of those people.
By the end of it, some of the crew had taken to calling me the Bamboo Sourcerer — half sorcery, half source. It wasn't far off. Finding the right bamboo, in the right diameter, at the right age, from a continent away if that's what the design demanded, was its own kind of magic trick.
The vision belonged to Roderick Romero — a New York City-based treehouse architect who has spent his career building for people like Sting and Trudie Styler, Val Kilmer, and Donna Karan. Roderick designed Mahinui Na Lani for owners Gail Armand and Robert van Sluis. But Roderick was five thousand miles away. Someone needed to be the eyes, the hands, and the daily presence on the mountain.
That was me.
I worked alongside Daryl MacDonald and Ian Weedman from the Treehouse Workshop — Daryl has since gone on to build a career of his own with the Treehouse Masters and a thriving YouTube following. Together, over the course of construction from July 2009 to February 2010, we built something that had never quite existed before: a fully off-grid, fully livable treehouse, suspended on Garnier limbs rated to 30,000 pounds each, with a composting toilet, a solar-heated outdoor shower, and a cedar hot tub on the lanai.
Nothing about this build came from a lumber yard.
The walls, floors, and siding are reclaimed heart redwood and cedar — salvaged from a church on Oʻahu. The heavy structural beams came from a demolished parking structure. The golden guadua bamboo was sourced from Colombia. The black bamboo was harvested from John Mood's farm in Ninole, on the east side of the Big Island.
Every piece of bamboo joinery in the structure uses what's called a fish-mouth joint — a technique where each joint is hand-cut to fit the exact curve and diameter of the piece it meets. There is no universal joint. Every single one is its own solution, cut once, fit once, right.
I designed and built the bamboo roof structure over the lanai myself — black bamboo rafters crossed with golden bamboo, woven bamboo panel as the ceiling backdrop. Looking up into it from inside the master suite remains one of the most beautiful things I've ever built.
What the photographs never show is the weather.
Volcano Village sits in a high-elevation rainforest, and the build happened in it — not around it. There were days I chiseled the handrail post holes by hand in the rain, hooded against the cold, fingers numb, working the bamboo the only way it can be worked: slowly, one hole at a time, by feel as much as by sight.
The roof installation happened thirty-eight feet up. I led that work myself — fitting the black bamboo rafters, tying the joinery, wrapping the most complicated handrail sections in hemp rope by hand. There is no shortcut at that height, in that weather, with that material. You either get it right the first time, or you climb back down and start again.
That's the part of the story the magazine photos never capture. The treehouse that ended up on MTV and in Ellen DeGeneres' production notes was built one cold, wet, exact motion at a time.
Stand on the second-floor master suite's front porch and look up, and you can see exactly how it comes together — guadua rafters crossing black bamboo purlins, the roofline cantilevered out over the railing, every joint doing real structural work thirty-eight feet above the forest floor.
Mahinui Na Lani was featured in Ke Ola Magazine, in a piece written by Devany Vickery-Davidson that named the work directly — Hawaiʻi Island bamboo expert and the team behind a structure she called a true marvel of sustainable design. It appeared on MTV's Extreme Cribs, on Entertainment Tonight, and caught the attention of Ellen DeGeneres, whose production team came to film it in person. Inhabitat and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser covered it as well.
The property has since been sold to new owners. But the structure — the joinery, the reclaimed wood, the black bamboo from Ninole, the roof I built with my own hands — is still standing in the clouds above Volcano, exactly where we left it.