LETTER : Tree houses and tall storeys

THERE is another - more "serious" and permanent - kind of tree house, not mentioned in "Aloft in Nature's Skyscrapers" (Review, 6 August) which I wish British architects, builders and their clients would build: specially designed tall houses which enable their dwellers to live three or four storeys above the ground in rooms stacked one above the other - or some other arrangement which allows life to be lived at the level of, and among , the branches of adjacent trees.

Not so many of us would want to live in the kind of houses illustrated, but if we had more imagination we would build very beautiful homes close to, and more in touch with, nature, as do people in British Columbia and other parts of afforested Canada and the United States. They take less land and you don't need a garden - the "garden" is all around you, viewable through large windows and from airy verandas or galleries which circle the house at the top levels.

Graham Carey

West Yorks