As a father of two children, I remember how fun it was watching my kids playing in a treehouse (much more fun than actually building the darn treehouse). These days, you don’t need paper and pencil to draw your treehouse ideas—you can co-create them with Image Creator in Microsoft Designer. All you need is a keyboard and a great imagination.
In fact, even if you are lacking in imagination at first, Image Creator can still generate some interesting and useful results.
Prompt: A simple treehouse in the backyard.
Three results:
Not bad, right? In fact, I was impressed that such a simple prompt yielded wonderful images like these.
But you don’t have to stop at the first result. With a little wordsmithing, you can mine for interesting ideas from Image Creator’s latent space. I’ve found that using Image Creator in the ideation and brainstorming phases of a project can lead to incredible results—combining my imagination with generative AI to visualize things I might have never thought of.
Thinking outside the box, literally
When most people visualize a treehouse, they typically think of a box-shaped house nestled within a tree. But do they always have to be boxes?
I’ve found that Image Creator is very good at letting me explore ideas that subvert my typical design assumptions and stereotypes. Like an inflatable treehouse, for example.
Prompt: An empty inflatable treehouse.
Three results:
While AI image generators still have some limitations, they are very good at quickly visualizing your spatial and architectural ideas with convincing materials, lighting, and color effects!
Here's another example: Why have a treehouse WITH a curly slide, when you can have a treehouse MADE from curly slides?
Prompt: Whimsical treehouse constructed entirely from curly slides.
Three results:
Of course, this doesn’t seem entirely practical, but it’s a lot of fun to visualize when it only takes a few seconds. Since Image Creator can generate images within seconds rather than hours or days, you have lots of freedom to experiment with even your wildest ideas.
Continuing our theme of breaking the box, here are “treehouses made by giant weaverbirds” (as one does, lol):
Prompt: Treehouses made by giant weaverbirds.
Three results:
Ok, maybe these are a bit on the fictional side for your own backyard. Plain box-shaped treehouses aren’t necessarily bad—they are certainly easier to construct. In the next section, we will take a look at ways to design more traditional box-based treehouses with Image Creator prompts.
Boxes, planes, and surfaces
When in doubt, and you want to break free of the typical treehouse look, study a bit of architecture. From ancient to classical to contemporary, architecture has many examples of composing boxes, planes, and surfaces in artful and interesting ways. As an example, I’ll use every non-architects’ favorite architectural style, midcentury modern.
Prompt: A complex modernist treehouse in the style of midcentury modern architecture.
Three results:
Of course, these seem oversized and much too complex. However, they do suggest an interesting direction for a treehouse—one composed of cascading, cantilevered floor planes and full window walls. Even the most outlandish images (let’s call them reality-adjacent) have elements that can inspire you for your own planning!
Besides, I always advocate for more people to study and understand architecture and question why our world is built the way it is. You can easily swap out different time periods and architectural styles into the prompt above to explore the differences between architectural styles.
Can Image Creator “architect” a treehouse?
Speaking of architecture, I wanted to test Image Creator’s understanding of architectural drawings.
Prompt: A detailed architectural drawing of a complex treehouse.
Three results:
Not too shabby, eh? Just to be clear, these drawings aren’t precise or accurate. However, you can see they are rather provocative in spelling out an aesthetic logic that could be followed, adapted, and further developed by a human architect (and/or a human treehouse-builder).
Last, I asked Image Creator to generate architectural diagrams of treehouses using the Microsoft Copilot app on my smartphone. With this method, I received interesting images along with a fascinating explanation from Copilot. Let’s start with the diagrams:
These are interesting to look at, and Copilot also includes a thorough, helpful text description to help you organize your project.
Take your creative ideas to new heights with Image Creator
And those are some ways to use Image Creator in Microsoft Designer to help you design a creative and unique treehouse. Good luck with your DIY projects! I wish Image Creator could help with the actual construction, but since it can’t, I’ll leave you with one last piece of advice: measure twice, cut once.