It’s an owl. It’s a library. And Charlotte school’s treehouse will soon be famous

It’s a safe bet that plenty of owls have appeared on Animal Planet, but the one being featured Friday is different.

Omni Montessori School in south Charlotte’s Blakeney/Ballantyne area recently moved into its new school library, a treehouse that looks like a huge owl. It was built by Pete Nelson, the builder who stars in Treehouse Masters, and will be featured on the show at 10 p.m. Friday.

The rounded structure, perched in the middle of the 7-acre campus, could be mistaken for a building on a platform. It’s approached from a wheelchair-accessible ramp, not a rope ladder or boards nailed to a tree. But it is actually anchored to five trees, with additional supports underneath to ensure safety.

“It came out beyond what anyone could have expected,” said Mo Baudhuin, mother of three Omni students and a treehouse library donor. “They put a lot of love into it.”

Nelson, founder of Nelson Treehouse and Supply, has been building high-end treehouses for 25 years, but said this is his first school library.

The project began incubating more than a year ago, when Gwen and Alan Gardner, another Omni family, had Nelson build a treehouse at their home in Waxhaw. Beth Addison, Omni’s development and communications director, started talking about how great it would be to have a treehouse library.

The Montessori method, created by an Italian educator, encourages children to explore the outdoors and the world of books. And even though suburban Charlotte has encircled the campus for younger students (in grades 7-9, Omni students move to a farm campus in Waxhaw), it still has the feel of a quiet nook in the woods.

Omni’s mascot is an owl, so Addison started talking up the idea of building an Owl’s Nest library in the trees. She drew up a sketch of a building shaped like a nest.

Nelson looked at it and declared it creative, but not terribly practical. Nor is his work cheap. Omni needed a donor to get Nelson’s crew back to Charlotte to build “the nest.”

Mo and D.J. Baudhuin stepped up. They’ve had children at Omni since 1999; their youngest is still a fifth-grader there. The school needed a new library anyway, and while a traditional building might have been cheaper, they were captivated by the vision.

Nelson started planning. He started with the idea for using round windows to create owl eyes, and went from there – cedar shingles that look a bit like feathers, the roofline jutting out like wings.

Last summer Nelson’s building crew swooped in, setting up camp in tents on the grounds. An Animal Planet film crew joined them. Students, faculty and parents watched in fascination as the library took shape.

By the time the work was done, other donors had chipped in for a library that cost close to $300,000. When all the inspections cleared and people got a look earlier this month, they saw such details as a spiral reading bench that illustrates the Fibonacci sequence and shelves that incorporate wood from the types of trees found on campus. Etched on a slice of wood is a quote from Maria Montessori: “Something emanates from these trees which speaks to the soul, something no book, no museum is capable of giving.”

For Nelson, the time at Omni was a chance to reconnect with his roots as a 6-year-old thrilling to his first treehouse, a tiny platform of wood and leftover kitchen linoleum in a New Jersey maple tree. He went into traditional home construction as a young adult, started building treehouses on the side, and eventually became a 54-year-old getting paid to do what he loves and show off his work on TV.

“Whatever your passion is, by all means try to make that your job,” he says.

Exactly the kind of message a Montessori school would endorse.

This story was originally published January 25, 2017 at 6:04 PM with the headline "It’s an owl. It’s a library. And Charlotte school’s treehouse will soon be famous."