Treehotel: The Future Can Be a Mirror Cube in a Swedish Forest
Treehotel, located in Harads in northern Sweden, is a collection of architect-designed rooms suspended among the trees. It is not one hotel concept repeated with different curtains. It is a small forest of ideas.
Not every future hotel needs to look like a spaceship.
Some of them look like a child’s impossible drawing that Scandinavian architects took very seriously.
Treehotel, located in Harads in northern Sweden, is a collection of architect-designed rooms suspended among the trees. It is not one hotel concept repeated with different curtains. It is a small forest of ideas: Mirrorcube, UFO, Bird’s Nest, Biosphere and other rooms that turn accommodation into architectural storytelling.
The Mirrorcube is perhaps the purest expression of the project. Treehotel describes it as a 4x4x4 meter cube surrounded by mirrored walls, reflecting and blending into the surrounding forest. Architectuul also describes the structure as a lightweight aluminium box hung around a tree trunk, clad in mirrored glass, creating a camouflaged refuge with views into the landscape.
Then there is the UFO room, because sometimes tastefully disappearing into nature is not enough and someone needs to sleep inside a flying saucer in the Swedish woods. Treehotel’s own description connects the room to a child’s perspective, with architect Bertil Harström creating both the Bird’s Nest and UFO as highly individual tree rooms.
But the most interesting recent addition may be Biosphere.
Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group and completed in 2022, Biosphere is a room for two surrounded by hundreds of birdhouses. Treehotel lists the project’s construction year as 2022 and credits BIG as the architect; BIG describes the cabin as bringing 350 birdhouses to Harads, designed in collaboration with ornithologist Ulf Öhman, with ecology driving the architectural expression.
This is why Treehotel belongs in the future hotels conversation.
It does not chase the usual futuristic codes: chrome, glass towers, infinity pools and dramatic press-release adjectives. Its future is quieter. More human. More experimental.
Treehotel asks a different question: what if hospitality became a way to rethink our relationship with nature, childhood, privacy and imagination?
Hotels usually sell control. They promise a version of the world where everything works, everything is clean, everything has been thought through by someone else. Treehotel keeps part of the world strange. You are in a forest, above the ground, inside an object that may disappear, mimic a nest, become a UFO or invite birds to live around you.
That strangeness is valuable.
Because the future should not only be efficient. It should still be weird.
In a culture obsessed with optimization, Treehotel offers something surprisingly radical: wonder.
Not the algorithmic kind. Not the luxury-retreat kind where wonder is included in the package.
The older kind.
The kind that makes an adult look up at a tree and think, yes, apparently we are sleeping there tonight.
