Alea LaRocque never had a treehouse when she was growing up, but she always wanted one. So, on her 30th birthday, her now-wife Ashley booked a stay at a treehouse hotel in Washington State. They were looking for a proper hotel with staff and services, not an Airbnb, and the Washington property was the only one Ashley could find. The treehouse itself was charming, but the guest experience fell flat. Later, the Denver-based couple visited a treehouse resort in Mexico, where they found the opposite: great hospitality but a barebones structure. What if, they wondered, a place offered both?
Six years later, the Juniper Lodge and Treehouses was born. But the path to get there wasn't an easy one.
“We have very high standards,” Alea, who spent years working in restaurants, told Field Mag. “We thought, why isn’t anyone doing this in Colorado?”
They began searching for properties and in 2019, they found exactly what they were looking for: a five-bedroom house with a wraparound deck on nine acres near Evergreen, in Colorado’s Front Range, 30 minutes west of Denver. The home had been running as a B&B, but what sold them was the sloped hillside next to the existing lodge, thick with towering pines. It was the perfect place to build a treehouse.
Alea & Ashley LaRocque | Photo by Megan Michelson
After closing, the couple moved on-site and operated the lodge as a bed and breakfast, while beginning work on building the treehouses. It turns out the treehouses of childhood dreams face a lot of roadblocks in real life. Zoning hurdles and construction challenges dragged the process out for years. “None of our vendors—excavator, builder, plumber—had ever worked on a treehouse,” Ashley says. “We had to convince people to take on the job.”
Now, six years after buying, their vision finally opened as an adults-only retreat that’s officially Colorado’s first treehouse hotel. In total, the Juniper property has five lodge suites in the original building and two new elevated cabins—the 206-square-foot Mountaineer’s Treehouse and the 390-square-foot Miner’s Treehouse—perched 25 feet above the ground. The two treehouses opened for guests this year. Plans for six more, including an ADA-accessible unit, are currently under development, with the next two treehouses expected to open in summer 2027.
When my friend JT and I arrived at Juniper Lodge on a recent spring afternoon, Alea greeted us at the front desk while Ashley mixed up blueberry gin and tonic welcome drinks. Their dog, Denali, who they call Nali, was curled up underfoot. All of it gave a vibe that was equal parts wild escape and arriving home.
