Playhouses You Can Build: Indoor & Backyard Designs

Build a lifetime of Memories

Whether simple or architecturally fanciful, a playhouse can be a magical place for your child. David and Jeanie Stiles use their own experiences to guide the amateur carpenter through the steps necessary to build an imaginative playhouse -- for the backyard, basement or playroom.

Designed to be put together with easy-to-obtain materials and common handyman tools, with clear step-by-step diagrams, these playhouses can be constructed by anyone who has basic carpentry skills (or a willingness to learn) and a weekend or two of spare time.

Projects include: A cardboard-box playhouse, a gingerbread playhouse, a fiberglass whale, a barn bed playhouse, a spook playhouse, a U.F.O. playhouse, a tree house, a log playhouse, a garden trellis playhouse, a three-legged fort and a complete selection of accessories.

David Stiles is a designer'/builder and together, with his wife Jeanie, has authored fifteen books, including Sheds: The Do-It-Yourself Guide, Revised Edition (Firefly 1998), The Treehouse Book (which won the ALA Notable Children's Book Award), and Cabins (Firefly 2001). A graduate of the Pratt Institute and the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy, David is the winner of two awards from the New York Planning Commission for his designs for The Playground for All Children.

David and Jeanie's articles have appeared in several magazines and newspapers including House Beautiful, Better Homes and Gardens, Country Living, Home Mechanix, Rebecca's Gardens, and The New York Times. They have appeared on numerous television programs, including Lifetime Television Our Home and the Discovery Channel's Home Matters shows. They divide their time between New York City and East Hampton, N.Y. where they live in a barn which they renovated themselves.