Cantrell Hill Tree House Blends Home, Woodlands

Cori Catlett and his father, Leon, admires the view from the home Cori is building at the top of Cantrell Hill in the Heights neighborhood of Little Rock.

Headed east down Little Rock’s Cantrell Hill, motorists have been able to catch a glimpse of an adventurous construction project that started last year. A glance to the left while beginning the winding descent affords a brief vista through the hardwoods and down the hillside on its progress.

But the passing view from Cantrell Road doesn’t hint that the grand home taking shape contains a distinct treehouse ambience.

“Yeah, we were going for something like a natural treehouse,” said homeowner Cori Catlett, executive vice president of Motel Sleepers Inc. “You feel like you’re floating out in the middle of the woods.”

Steel and concrete provide the structural muscle allowing the back of the home to reach out over the slope and into the treetops. The exterior awaits cladding of native stone and earth-tone stucco with glasswork aplenty to look out over the wooded hollow.

“When you’re inside the house, you feel like you’re in a treehouse,” said Bill Parkinson, president of Parkinson Building Group. “When the house is finished, it will feel like it’s always been there. It will be very connected to its surroundings.”

Catlett had chewed on the idea of building a home in Little Rock’s Heights area. But he didn’t want to follow the well-worn path of buying an older residence, tearing it down and shoehorning a modern McMansion onto the property.

Catlett wanted enough ground to match the scale of his dream home and provide his family with outdoors elbow room to enjoy. The options in the well-established Heights neighborhoods were few and far between.

“It’s hard to build without being on top of someone in this part of town,” he said of his development dilemma.

That situation changed when he learned of an opportunity through his father: The long-time home of Lois Park was for sale following her death in October 2015.

The 3,050-SF home on the northern slope of Cantrell Hill sat on a wooded 3.2-acre parcel that screamed redevelopment possibilities.

“It was kind of like we’ll buy the property, and if you decide to build a house someday, we’ll have the property,” said Leon Catlett of the $750,000 purchase in 2016.

The location, next door to his home, also presented the chance to have his son’s family for a neighbor and the assembly of three generations of Catletts.

The new home project didn’t get rolling until the summer of 2017 when the Park house was demolished.

“We took our time,” Cori Catlett said. “It took three months to get the building plans together with the architects, and we didn’t sign a construction contract until June 2018.”

Backed with a $1.8 million construction loan from Conway’s Centennial Bank, work on the new home was off and running last summer.

“We started our portion of the site prep work in the second half of July and moved on to the construction of the home in mid-August,” Parkinson said. “You’d almost break your ankles walking through jagged chunks of rock covered by ivy across parts of the property.

“We finally figured out it was debris from when they built Cantrell Road. They just pushed the rocks and dirt off the roadway and down the slope. In places, it was 4-6 feet deep with debris. It was like that all the way down to the creek.”

The land area of the property is more than double that of Catlett’s current 1.3-acre home site less than 2 miles west in the Broadview Terrace neighborhood. The topography is lot more severe though.

“It’s a pretty big piece of property, but it has a pretty steep slope to it,” said Jeff Horton of Herron Horton Architects. “There were a lot of site issues to work around. We picked a happy medium on placement of the new house.”

The footprint of the new house extends out over the hillside, north of where the Park home stood. Steel tied to concrete footings set in bedrock provides the load-bearing support on the back of the split-level house, which culminates in four decks on the upper main floor and one on the lower floor.

“They did a great job of working the house into the lot,” Parkinson said. “They didn’t let the slope mandate the shape of the house.

“They came up with a fun design with the back of the house hanging off the slope and tucked out into the trees. That was one of the more impressive things: to not let the slope define the lie of the house.”

The new layout will be a flip-flop compared to the old residence. Instead of landscaped gardens in back, the new house will feature its plantings and a greenhouse in front.

“Where we sited it was the leftover flat piece of backyard,” Horton said. “The backyard of the old house is the front yard of the new house.”

Catlett said the front garden will be a phased project featuring fountains, walkways and a greenhouse that won’t begin to form until after the house is finished.

“The front of the house is where everything will really take place,” he said. “The back we’re going to keep wild.”

Spans of site-built cedar trusses carry a cabin-type aesthetic throughout the home’s 6,900-SF living area. Teak cabinetry is on the menu for the kitchen.

Stonework will join the woodwork to bring the outside indoors, visually bridged by the windows.

“There will be a lot of stone on the walls on the outside, accent walls on the inside and cut stone on the floor,” Horton said. “The house itself has a pretty standard feel from the roofline. Once you’re inside, it reveals itself with all the glass and the views into the trees.

“We always design our projects with a lot of glass because we like to let in as much light as we can and let nature in.”

Construction of the home is entering its ninth month with Catlett eyeing a move-in date in September, maybe.

“We planned for anywhere from 15-18 months to build,” he said. “The weather has killed me.”

One of the surprises of the project came from the change-of-season effect on the woods. After the trees dropped their leaves, an unexpected view from the east side of the house was revealed: the Emerald Park bluffs on the north side of the Arkansas River.

“Maybe I should’ve built the house a little higher,” Catlett mused wistfully.