Minnesota tree fort builder crafts imagination into reality
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Picture the play structures for kids that you’d find in the backyard of a home. Most follow a similar template: A slide, a swing, maybe a small ladder.
Minnesota builder Adam Rasmussen operates outside that framework.
“This one is kind of like a two-story stacked clubhouse. Below, we’re going to have hammocks. There’s a pulley box and bucket that you can lift things up to the top,” Rasmussen said, hard at work building a tree fort in the yard of an Eden Prairie home earlier this fall.
Rasmussen is the founder — and one of two builders — of the company Fortz, where he designs and builds playhouses and treehouses from scratch.
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Rasmussen studied cabin design at the University of Minnesota, and had a small architecture firm working on geodesic domes and tiny homes. That was great — until the COVID-19 pandemic.
“My son was home with me a lot of the time, and we were both very tired of being inside and staring at a computer screen,” he said.
Rasmussen said he needed an outdoor outlet for his son, so he built him a play structure. He didn’t think it was the beginning of a full-time opportunity, until people started to bring their kids over.
“And they’re like, ‘You need to build this for other families!’ And I was like, ‘You know what? I could — I could do this,’” he recalled.
Now, five years later, Rasmussen is booked out for months. And each build he takes on is different. There aren’t any guides or kits; everything’s completely custom.
“This really keeps me on my toes and using my brain which I absolutely love, even though it’s exhausting at the end of the day. I try and remind myself that I need to relax and recover,” Rasmussen said.
Fellow Fortz builder Alo Osberg said that while they try to come as prepared as possible to a job site, challenges still persist.
“We’re always working at height, right? So, trying to figure out how to lift really heavy things above our heads, and sometimes in the backwoods … sometimes not really close to accessible roads,” they said.
Rasmussen said he works closely with families to make structures interesting for kids at different age levels, trying to keep things adaptable as kids grow.
“There’s always like the fun, exciting things, like the secret storage, and the trapdoors and the secret entrances,” he said. “And, you know, ‘no parents allowed’ and … that kind of quintessential clubhouse-y stuff that we like to tap into.”
He said forts become the center of the kids’ community. And he said giving a creative space kids can call their own is meaningful work.
“I have a son with special needs, and to be able to have kids be included, and have a space that they can call their own and be proud to show off to their friends, means a lot to me,” he said.
For homeowner Erin Kindy, whose daughter will be the one enjoying the structure in Eden Prairie, the process has been exciting.
“We were … not really into assembling something out of the box ourselves from like a big box store,” Kindy said. “We were …. like, ‘OK, let’s find something that’s gonna bring some enchantment to our side yard here.”
While Rasmussen said his dream is to give every kid a fort, he acknowledged the costs that come with any major construction project.
“I always encourage kids to use their creativity. I have so many fun ideas that are less expensive to do, even just like using sticks in your backyard to create kind of a more natural fort,” he said.
Rasmussen said they’ve done Make-a-Wish projects, an outdoor project for a nursery school, and an indoor play structure for an apartment complex.
And when Rasmussen and Osberg complete a fort and leave the job site, they’re passing the torch. Rasmussen said he feels like there’s less childhood freedom and expression these days — and by building forts, he’s giving a little of that back to kids.
“I want kids to feel like they can cut them up and add on, and you know, create a new window or connect a bridge over to the house,” he said. “I want kids to kind of take over from there.”
