Today we’d like to introduce you to Jacob Rhodes.
Hi Jacob, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Building HoneyTree from a daydream into a thriving enterprise has been a life-changing adventure for our family.
In 2017, my wife and I moved our family from Houston to her hometown in the Texas Hill Country. Fredericksburg has long been known for its B&Bs and its natural beauty, and we planned to take our savings and build a small cabin for some side income.
We picked a site on the bank of a Sycamore-lined creek near Katie’s childhood home. But as we cleared the site we realized several Texas live oaks were crowding it. To save the native trees, we reimagined our cabin as a treehouse, using the sturdy oaks for piers.
I had never built any kind of house before (let alone a treehouse), and during construction I was often holding a tool with one hand and watching a DIY YouTube video with the other. What size lumber do I need for my cantilevered deck joists? How do I calculate stringers for a winding staircase? What adhesive should I use to tile a backsplash on drywall? But I was a decent handyman, and my mantra was always “when in doubt: overbuild,” and the treehouse began to take shape.
One challenge we didn’t foresee was just how much conflict Katie and I would run into over design decisions. Window placement, roof pitch, flooring… every decision was a new opportunity for discord, and our marriage was suffering. So I came up with a compromise: Katie would take the lead on this treehouse, and I would take the lead on our next one. Katie realized my “compromise” was really a ploy to let me build another treehouse in a huge live oak nearby. But she shook on the deal, and this is when the happy movie montage begins: hosting guests in our first treehouse, The Sycamore, while diving into construction on the next one, picking more building sites, sketching more plans, raising walls, thrifting furniture. Our tiny dream just kept growing and blooming.
In March of 2020 we bought a big load of lumber to build our fourth and fifth treehouses, and right then COVID-19 hit the travel industry like a brick wall. Every existing reservation canceled; new bookings evaporated, and we held our breath with the rest of the world. Just when we were beginning to believe that this could really be the end of the dance, the music came flooding back — and louder than ever. Now everyone and their cousin wanted to escape their locked-down cities for a few days in a peaceful, private space. And that’s exactly what HoneyTree did best.
We opened the Acorn and the Leaf Treehouses in the fall of 2020 during a period of unprecedented demand and publicity. In August 2020, the Live Oak Treehouse made it into the top ten most wish-listed destinations in the world on Airbnb. Our unique enclave of five treehouses — The Meadow by HoneyTree — was starting to pop up in news stories; the Acorn Treehouse was featured on Airbnb’s Instagram feed as one of their best unique stays; I began stumbling across pictures of my own treehouses on Instagram and Pinterest — the places where much of my own inspiration had come from in the first place.
So we took another big step. We partnered with my brother John, and designed twelve new treehouses for a hillside between Fredericksburg and Enchanted Rock State Park. We were committed to building totally unique structures — no replications. But just a few weeks after we began construction, a terrible ice storm decimated most of the trees on our new property — the property we had purchased to build treehouses.
Natural disasters have their way of bringing out the best in people, and we began to work alongside our neighbors clearing limbs and persevering with a new version of our plan. We adjusted some designs and confidently deployed our favorite treehouse amenities: outdoor bathtubs, rooftop stargazing patios, helical staircases, round windows, and glass garage doors that would open onto decks with epic views. We named the complex Blue Sage by HoneyTree, and opened for bookings in December 2023.
We have been honored to host guests from all over the world. Today I am approaching 3000 guest reviews as an Airbnb Superhost with an average of 4.99 stars across all of our treehouses. But even with the increase in the size of our business, Katie and I take the time to read every single guest review because it reminds us why we do what we do. Early in the HoneyTree journey we decided to walk away from a lot of “conventional wisdom” that said, Put More Heads in More Beds! Big TVs! Private Hot Tubs! Private Hot Tubs with Big TVs! While there is indeed a market for those things, we wanted to sell something different: something that encourages people to hear the birds and the creek and to look up at the stars.
Many of us are flooded with eye-candy on Instagram, and as pictures of our treehouses have spread online we have redoubled our efforts to give our guests something real — something better than the pictures. People choose HoneyTree to host some of the most important parts of their stories: marriage proposals, healing retreats, babymoons, milestone celebrations. We love being a part of those stories, and hope that the memories made in our treehouses will bring them joy for years to come.
Jacob and Katie live in Fredericksburg, Texas with their five young children, and their plants and animals, running HoneyTree and dreaming about what might come next.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.honeytreefbg.com/
- Instagram: @honeytreefbg
