Ninety Minutes from Los Angeles, a World Away: Inside The Pine Mountain Club Treehouse

The city releases you gradually. The freeway gives way to highway, the highway gives way to two lanes, and somewhere along the mountain road that winds into the Los Padres National Forest, the last of Los Angeles dissolves entirely. By the time you reach Pine Mountain Club — elevation 5,700 feet, population small enough that people still wave at strangers — the pace of things has already shifted. You feel it before you can name it.

The treehouse is perched at the end of a quiet road, half-hidden by pine. The first thing you notice is the light.

The Living Space

Step inside and the ceiling lifts — twenty feet of open air above you, the kind of volume that makes a room feel like a decision rather than a dimension. Floor-to-ceiling windows wrap the eastern, northern, and western faces of the house, and through them the surrounding ridgeline presents itself at eye level, close enough to feel personal. The forest doesn't frame the view here — it is the view. Adele and Carlo made a specific choice to paint the window frames black, not for aesthetic reasons alone but as an act of visual erasure.

"If anything, it's been about reducing distraction from the view. We've painted the frames black so the frames disappear. I want people to forget that they're in a house." — Carlo

The living area is held to a quiet minimum. A curated selection of books — most of them Adele and Carlo's own, read rather than displayed — occupies a low shelf. Board games are stacked in a wooden box near the sofa. The record collection, built over years and brought here from their own shelves, sits beside a turntable. There is no accent wall, no statement artwork, nothing that pulls focus from the treeline pressing against the glass. The restraint is the design.

The Kitchen and Dining Room

The kitchen opens directly into the dining room without interruption — a single continuous space that functions, as Adele intended, less as a room and more as a natural gathering point.

"The central theme in both houses: you walk in, you're hit by the views, but the space is open. We've made the kitchen a central point of hangout because people are hanging out in kitchens." — Adele

At the centre of the dining room stands a custom solid oak table, handcrafted and built for eight — generous enough for a large family, intimate enough for two. The grain of the timber catches the morning light that enters early and moves slowly across the room. This is a table designed for long meals, for the kind of unhurried conversation that doesn't happen when there's anywhere else to be. The kitchen itself is fully equipped, the pantry stocked before arrival, the espresso machine waiting. Adele and Carlo understand that a stay should feel like walking into someone's home, not a hotel room — because it is.

The Bedrooms

Four bedrooms occupy the upper and lower levels, each given its own orientation and character. The master suite is set apart from the others — reached through a private corridor, it opens onto a reading nook and a small kitchenette before arriving at a room that holds its own sense of stillness. A desk faces the window. Morning light arrives slowly, without urgency.

The other bedrooms share the same commitment to considered simplicity: warm timber tones, textiles chosen for feel rather than trend, windows positioned to pull in the particular quality of light that characterises each aspect of the house. Nothing is generic. Nothing has been sourced from a catalogue with a rental property in mind.

The Spa

At the heart of the lower level, a spa room that takes its cues from the Japanese understanding of bathing as a daily act of restoration rather than routine. A deep egg-shaped soaking tub sits at the centre, accompanied by a rainfall shower and an infrared sauna clad in warm timber. The sequence has the quality of an onsen — a single enclosed space designed to slow the body before the mind follows.

Adele and Carlo chose the same soaking tub for both their properties. It is, in its quiet way, a statement of values: that rest deserves the same architectural intention as a dining room or a living space. That the act of switching off begins in the body.

The Decks and the Forest

Three separate decks extend the living space outward into the treeline, each positioned to capture a different aspect and a different hour. The front deck faces east, catching the first light of morning. The rear opens to the ridgeline, where evenings dissolve slowly into amber and then dark. The lower-level deck sits among the pines at a height that earns the treehouse name — surrounded by canopy, level with the treetops, elevated just enough to feel suspended.

The Los Padres National Forest begins at the edge of the property. Trails leave from here in multiple directions, ranging from gentle paths through mixed pine and oak to the demanding ascent of Mt. Pinos — the highest point in Los Padres, just under 8,832 feet — where in August the annual Perseid meteor shower draws stargazers from across Southern California to skies that feel, on clear nights, like the full breadth of the cosmos laid out for the occasion.

Pine Mountain Club itself is a ten-minute walk: Bear Claw Bakery for pastries and hot chocolate in the mornings, The Perch pub for evenings that extend longer than intended, the community golf course and archery range for afternoons. It does not feel like a resort town. It feels like a place where people know each other and intend to keep it that way.

On Staying Here

"They'll be taken care of by us throughout the booking, and the nature will do the rest. People come here to switch off and connect with their family. They leave inspired and feeling regenerated." — Adele

Adele and Carlo have 169 five-star reviews. The thing guests say most often on arrival — two people who have spent careers in professional photography — is that the photographs don't capture it.

"What does that say about us as photographers? We're not really good." — Carlo

The pantry is stocked. The record player works. They reply within five minutes.

‍Adele and Carlo's second home, An A-Frame Above the World, sits forty minutes south at the threshold of desert and mountain in the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto National Monument — a different landscape entirely, the same design intelligence. The story behind both homes and the studio Carlo built from them: Studio Japandy and the Long Way Round →

Book directly with Adele and Carlo through Locèlle — fee-free, transparent, and with a direct line to the people who built this place.

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Photography provided by Adele and Carlo