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Four thousand feet up in an ʻōhiʻa cloud forest on Hawaii’s Big Island sits a treehouse built to survive on rain, sun, and nothing else.
Joey Riz’s GoPro Hero6 Black footage takes viewers inside Mahinui Na Lani, an off-grid honeymoon retreat suspended over a lava tube near Volcano and Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The name translates to “beautiful sky,” and the structure earns it — a two-level treehouse reached by moon gate, garden trail, and a steep ship’s ladder, built almost entirely from salvaged wood and bamboo. It’s the kind of build that shows up on architecture blogs and honeymoon bucket lists for the same reason: nothing about it looks improvised.
- Mahinui Na Lani was built between July 2009 and February 2010 by treehouse architect Roderick Romero and Big Island bamboo specialist Bobby Grimes for owners Robert and Gail van Sluis.
- The house is suspended among living ʻōhiʻa trees using Garnier Limbs — steel artificial limbs rated to hold up to 30,000 pounds each without damaging the trees.
- Roughly 98 percent of the build came from salvaged and sustainable material, including redwood and cedar reclaimed from an Oahu church and beams pulled from a demolished parking garage.
Engineering a House Around Living Trees
What separates Mahinui Na Lani from a rustic platform nailed into a trunk is the engineering underneath it. Romero and Grimes anchored the structure to its ʻōhiʻa hosts with Garnier Limbs, load-bearing steel supports designed to distribute weight without girdling or killing the tree — each one rated for 30,000 pounds. The whole thing hangs directly over a natural lava tube, a detail that turns the approach itself into part of the experience: guests cross a moon gate, follow a garden trail, and climb a steep ship’s ladder just to reach the front door.
The bamboo work is where the craftsmanship really shows. Builders combined Colombian Guadua bamboo with local Big Island black bamboo, joining pieces with handcrafted fish-mouth joints rather than hardware. Paired with the reclaimed redwood, cedar, and salvaged parking-garage beams, the structure reads less like a treehouse kit and more like a custom timber-frame home that happens to be thirty feet in the air. Readers who like this kind of unconventional build will also recognize the appeal behind The Pinecone Treehouse, another spectacular tiny home built into the canopy.
Inside the Two-Level Retreat
Once inside, the details keep compounding. An antique Balinese door serves as the entry, opening onto a two-level layout with stained-glass windows crafted by local artist Seneca La Londe. The upper bedroom is only reachable through a trap door, giving the sleeping quarters a genuine treehouse feel rather than a lodge dressed up to look rustic. A Jotul propane fireplace handles the cooler cloud-forest nights, while a cedar soaking hot tub and an open-air shower sit outside, framed by the ʻōhiʻa canopy.
Built from roughly 98 percent salvaged and sustainable materials, suspended over a lava tube on steel limbs rated for 30,000 pounds — this isn’t glamping, it’s engineering.
Living Off the Grid at 4,000 Feet
Mahinui Na Lani runs entirely off-grid. A rainwater catchment system supplies water, solar panels handle daytime power, and a backup generator with a battery bank covers the gaps. There’s no utility line running up the mountain — everything the property needs, it either collects, stores, or generates on-site. It’s a setup that echoes other self-sufficient builds in this space, including the fully solar- and rain-fed setup covered in Spectacular Floating Home is Self-Built & Off-Grid.
That off-grid identity, combined with the location, is exactly why the property has built a reputation well beyond Joey Riz’s video. Mahinui Na Lani has been showcased in architectural features and on television, including an appearance on MTV’s “Cribs,” and it’s marketed internationally as a honeymoon destination for couples wanting something more secluded than a resort suite.
A Cloud Forest Honeymoon Spot
Part of the appeal is simply where it sits. At around 4,000 feet in the native ʻōhiʻa cloud forest, the air is cooler and mistier than the coastal resorts most visitors picture when they think of the Big Island, and Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is close enough to make day trips easy. It’s a different flavor of Hawaiian escape than the one most tourists book — closer in spirit to the volcano-adjacent stay covered in We Slept in a Jungle Treehouse (Overlooking an Active Volcano) than to a beachfront hotel.
Riz’s footage runs through the moon gate, the ladder, the trap-door bedroom, the hot tub — all of it shot handheld on a GoPro Hero6 Black, which is fitting for a house built to feel like it grew there rather than got installed. As he puts it in the video, the footage barely does the place justice, and for a honeymoon spot built on Garnier Limbs over a lava tube, that’s probably the point — you don’t really get it until you’re standing on the ship’s ladder yourself.
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