Karlie Kloss Visits Sweden’s Treehotel

There is perhaps no greater luxury than to be enveloped in natural beauty, to feel the strength of the forest and the purity of the sky, to hear the sound of a running river. And if you’re seeking rejuvenation, there is perhaps no greater need. In the heart of Swedish Lapland, there is a place created for just this purpose. Treehotel stands 46 miles outside the Arctic Circle, where the northern lights flash overhead in winter and the midnight sun shines bright in summer. Here you are invited to laze on a rock while listening to the powerful Lule River; to swim, raft, bicycle, snowshoe, ski, take a sauna or an outdoor bath in a Hikki hot tub, fly-fish, dogsled, try a moose safari or “ice dining”: eating by candlelight in a warm tepee on a frozen lake. The resort is pristine, renewing, a spa without a spa. The property is often so quiet that guests can hear themselves breathe.
The hotel was inspired by a 2008 documentary called The Tree Lover, by Swedish director Jonas Selberg Augustsén. The film tells the story of three men who leave behind their busy lives in Stockholm to build a cabin in the forest, high in a pine tree. Its message is more philosophical than practical, arguing that trees are essential for human life, for our physical and spiritual well-being. The natural world provides us with roots, oxygen, a place to reflect. Siddhartha did not find enlightenment in a school or church. He sat at the foot of a banyan tree for 49 days and stood up as the Buddha.

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Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier, Vogue, December 2014

The film resonated so powerfully with Kent and Britta Jonsson Lindvall that they decided to follow suit, building their own lofted cabins deep in the pines. Treehotel, which opened in 2010 outside the village of Harads, now has six fantastic, almost fantastical, tree houses, each commissioned by one of Scandinavia’s leading architecture firms. The results are arresting: physically beautiful, yes, but also seamlessly connected to the landscape. The Mirrorcube, which is exactly as it sounds and is perched high among the tree trunks, reflects the landscape and sky, almost melting into its surroundings. Nearby hangs the Bird’s Nest, an organic structure so naturalistic and camouflaged, especially in the winter snow, that it’s tough to see it’s there. “The whole thing is absolutely elemental—the scent of birches, the painterly light, the stillness and the silence. You shed your skin,” says recent guest Kate Hawley, a New Zealand costume designer for such movies as Edge of Tomorrow. Most Treehotel visitors—who include the Swedish Crown Princess Victoria, and Kate Moss and family—fly in from New York, Paris, or London, urban jungles teeming with people and technological life. Newcomers often take two or three days to unwind. Then it happens—their minds slow and their bodies relax, and they never want to leave.
Treehotel’s owners and guests are onto something. Until recently, the restorative value of spending time in nature fell into the amorphous realms of speculation and spirituality, not the solid ground of science. Lately, this has started to change. Some of the first data points came from another inspired and unlikely sylvan project: the invention of shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing.” In 1982, the Japanese Forestry Agency put forth the idea that if the nation’s stressed and depressed citizens—the Japanese have among the highest suicide rates in the world—would just walk their forest therapy trails, they would soak up the sensory splendor and soothe their weary minds. So people began walking. Years later the Japanese invited researchers to walk as well, and ask forest bathers for a few minutes to submit to testing of their blood pressure, pulse, cortisol levels, and other markers of mental health. The resulting paper, published in 2011, confirmed what the Lindvalls and many others had known all along: Forest bathing was not just a flaky hippie pastime. The natural world quantifiably relieves symptoms of stress. It also bolsters the immune system. In more recent years, studies in Sweden, England, Canada, Australia, and the United States have produced similar results. More work is necessary in order to pinpoint exactly how the natural world can alleviate psychological problems, but a consensus is starting to build. In September 2014, a meta-analysis of 21 studies and more than 8,500 subjects declared firmly that connection to nature “significantly predicts happiness.”

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Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier, Vogue, December 2014

And just in time, really. We’re in dire need of a bracing blast of fresh air. Antidepressants are the drugs most commonly prescribed to Americans aged eighteen to 44, and usage has increased nearly 400 percent in the past two decades. But the thrill of the quick 10 mg fix may be wearing off. As we’ve learned with diet and sleep, superficial solutions (aspartame, say, or uppers) seldom solve real problems. True health requires a deeper, more holistic approach. “There is a growing sense among my patients that these ‘quickies’ might come at too big a cost in terms of side effects,” says Daphne Miller, M.D., associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. “People are saying, ‘If antidepressants will really make a difference, I will consider taking them. But what are five other things I can do in my life to quell anxiety or elevate my mood?’ ”
To understand how the so-called nature cure works, you can think either very big or very small. If you think big, the place to begin is with Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson’s theory of biophilia—that is, the idea that human beings are drawn to life. Plants, animals, mountains, streams: These things matter to us, just as relationships with other people do. We have an innate, emotional need to connect with the environment, Wilson claims. Nature makes us feel whole.

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Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier, Vogue, December 2014

The concept of biophilia helped catapult Wilson to academic superstardom in the eighties. It also pushed psychology further along in a process of development that had begun decades earlier. “I use the analogy of a camera,” says Patricia Hasbach, Ph.D., a psychotherapist and coauthor, with Peter Kahn, Jr., of the 2012 book Ecopsychology: Science, Totems, and the Technological Species. “You can open up the lens wider to shift the focus.” In the early days of clinical psychology, thanks in part to Freud, who believed that nature “destroys us—coldly, cruelly, relentlessly”—the focus of the field was very narrow, taking in just the contents of one person’s mind, the ego, superego, and id. Next, psychology broadened its scope to look at relationships between people, then to interactions in whole families, then to society at large. Now the lens is opening wider still, to include the natural world.
A few terms to clarify: Ecopsychology is the study of the relationship between human beings and nature. Ecotherapy is the practice of examining and using those relationships to improve mental health. Hasbach, who works as an ecotherapist in Eugene, Oregon, sometimes meets with clients outdoors, but more often she practices in a bland, conventional therapy room (albeit one overlooking a handsome group of trees). From there, she helps clients feel better by considering their relationships with nature, just as another therapist might focus on relationships with partners or parents. Hasbach told me about one client who often jogged on Sunday mornings, and described the feelings of fear, freedom, and exhilaration she experienced one week after leaving her regular route and taking an unknown trail. For another client, Hasbach suggested focusing on sunsets, considering the suite of sadness, loss, and beauty that accompanies change. Typically Hasbach assigns homework, some of it very basic: Track how much time you spend outside. Track your mood. Track how many minutes each day you look at screens. “When we’re depressed,” says Hasbach, “we dig ourselves into a hole,” isolating ourselves from one another and from nature.
“One of our chief problems is that we’re lonely as a species,” says Richard Louv, author of The Nature Principle (2011) and the man who popularized the idea of nature-deficit disorder—its hypothesis being that spending too little time outside creates social and emotional problems. He is quite blunt. “The more disengaged we get from nature, the lonelier we become.”

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Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier, Vogue, December 2014

But how does it work, neurologically? Why would time at Treehotel or elsewhere in nature affect our minds and alter how we feel? If you try to understand the nature cure on a small scale, perhaps the best place to start is with the notion that nature invigorates us because it refreshes our ability to pay attention. As Marc Berman, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Chicago who studies memory and depression, explained to me, there are two kinds of attention: direct attention—the kind most of us use at work or at school—in which you make a deliberate effort to keep your mind on a specific task. Then there’s involuntary attention, in which your mind locks on to stimuli like a sunset or a waterfall with minimal effort. Direct attention is easily fatigable; involuntary attention is much less so. And it turns out, according to Berman and other psychologists, “environments that aren’t taxing of direct attention while drawing involuntary attention” restore the mind. Television requires direct attention, so is not restorative. A darkened room does not draw involuntary attention, so is not restorative either. What’s renewing is a walk in the park or an afternoon at the beach.
In a work context, the value of resting the mind through exposure to nature is obvious and well documented: Take a tired person. Read him a string of numbers. Ask that person to recall those numbers in reverse order. Tell that person to go for a walk in a natural setting, and when he comes back he’ll do better on the number test. But depressed people also have tired brains, as depression and anxiety causes people to ruminate, to work thoughts over and over in their minds. “When a person’s depressed, there’s a lot of activity that’s loud and hard to shut down. It becomes a burden and interferes with the ability to do other things,” explains Jason Duvall, a lecturer and researcher at the University of Michigan. This may make time in nature, which tends to be softly fascinating, especially therapeutic. In a paper Duvall coauthored for the Sierra Club’s Military Families and Veterans Initiative, he reported that veterans with mental-health issues who go on wilderness trips show improved mood and ability to focus on their return.

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Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier, Vogue, December 2014

Whether the experience is pleasant or not appears not to matter much. Berman conducted a study in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in which he sent people out on walks in wintry weather. While they did not enjoy it, they still felt replenished when they returned. Other researchers have measured the benefits of what they call horticulture therapy—really just a fancy term for gardening—finding that it improves memory, lifts depression, and breaks tiresome cycles of rumination. What doesn’t work? Looking at pretty pictures of nature on screens. So browse the Treehotel Web site all you want—it’s delightful. But digital images boost the spirit about as much as a blank wall.
Given that I live in California, not Sweden, last summer I arranged a walk with Jan Edl Stein, director of the Holos Institute, a community counseling center in San Francisco that aims to treat “the whole person . . . taking into account the body, mind, heart, and spirit.” As we hiked through the Marin Headlands to a small, isolated cove, she told me about her ecotherapy workshops, which focus on the “renewal and rediscovery of inner and outer landscapes.” I have to admit, at times I wished for the solitude of the Mirrorcube, as I found her language a little off-putting. As one might imagine, the nature cure tends to attract Earth Mother personalities. And the truth is, the whole concept is still imprecise. We’re just beginning to understand why and how a lazy day by a river helps our minds. Is it easier to think about painful things in beautiful places because the small fascinations and restorations prevent our minds from straying into darker territory? Do problems simply seem smaller and more manageable when set against the planet’s grand scale? At this point we don’t know.
Yet it’s hard to discount all the personal accounts of refreshing stays at the beach or in the mountains or at Treehotel. As Stein points out, traditional psychotherapy, like mood meds, has side effects too. “Lying on a couch in a stuffy office for 25 years, talking about your childhood, you will grow up,” says Stein, “because you will age. But you’ll miss out on so much.”