Every summer when Mark Erickson was growing up, his family would drive three hours west of their home in Calgary through the mountainous wilderness of Banff to visit their spartan two-bedroom cottage in Windermere, B.C. The remote cabin is where he learned to fish, build tree forts in the forest, and most importantly, birdwatch. Erickson recalls spending hours sitting with his late grandfather on the front porch, learning how to identify birds by their calls. “As a kid I had all these fantasies about what it would be like to fly,” he says. To this day, he continues birding with his mother. “We’ll still discover birds we haven’t seen out there before, which is always pretty exciting.”

Two decades on, Erickson’s avian fascination is as strong as ever—and, in 2016, he began to dream of a way to get closer to the bird world. Erickson, who’s the principal architect of the firm Studio North in Calgary, designed a small space near the family cabin where he could sleep amid the canopy of the trees. The Bird Hut, completed in 2017, is a whimsical, human-scale birdhouse resting on wooden stilts 100 feet off the ground. (To reach the deck, he has to travel up an elevated stone path on a hill.)

At only 100 square feet, the hut has barely enough room to fit a king-sized mattress on the floor. However, the small footprint was strategic: any structure 100 square feet or under doesn’t require a building permit, which gave Erickson free rein to create a truly madcap, experimental structure.

The entire structure only cost $3,000. This is because Erickson repurposed materials from previous builds: the hut sits on a deck platform made from boards taken from the old deck on the main cabin, which Erickson and his dad rebuilt in 2016.

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