Fresh out of college, Foster Huntington secured a job designing at Ralph Lauren after a designer at the company saw his photo blog. It was an awesome opportunity, and he loved doing it. But while most kids his age were seeking security, he was seeking freedom.
Huntington wanted to minimize his possessions and minimize his life, so he bought a van. "I didn't want to spend my youth in an office," he told Business Insider. Along with the job, he had also gotten a book deal stemming from his work online. He took the advance money and hit the road, telling himself, "If I don't do it now, I never will."
But being the internet expert he is, he kept growing his massive presence on social media, turning his travels into an immensely popular Instagram as well as fourdifferentTumblraccounts (he has nearly a million followers on Instagram and about half a million combined on his Tumblr accounts).
Being on the road was great, but he found it harder to be productive. So he decided to park his Volkswagen van for a bit and pursue another dream that was a little more stationary, this time building a treehouse with his friends that he could live in and work from.
The Cinder Cone, as they call it, has been in construction for over a year, and this past month Huntington ran a Kickstarter to fund a book about the project, which has already reached more than $70,000 — more than doubling his goal.
We let Huntington, now 27, tell us in his own words about the treehouse, how he uses social media and the internet to his advantage, and his overall journey so far as a nomad and creative in the 21st century.
"The treehouse was mainly a collaboration between me and Tucker Gordon. He really handled the design of it. Creatively, it's both of ours, but Tucker was the one who really translated some abstract ideas I had into reality. And it shows. He's an amazing designer."
"We referenced a bunch of design books, like the 'Tiny Homes' series by Lloyd Kahn. We watched movies like 'Indiana Jones,' 'Huck Finn,' 'Star Wars,' 'Swiss Family Robinson,' and 'Hook,' where they had these fantastical buildings. Why can't those be reality? They can: You just gotta build them."
"I'm dyslexic, so at a young age, I was really drawn to photo books. I remember when I was a kid I was really into remote-control airplanes. I'd go to the library and look at all the books they had. I wouldn't read them; I would just look at all the photos. Photos of people building them, photos of people flying them. That is something that I feel doesn't really translate as well to modern electronic media."
