Amazon building tree houses for its employees

There are very few tech companies in the world that put in tough efforts to make sure their employees get the best office culture and a conducive environment to work in. Amazon surely is one of them. We aren’t talking about special chairs, restrooms or café. This is something different, really different- Tree houses.

According to The New York Times, employees at Amazon are getting a special greenhouse, which will contain a conjoined series of tree houses. The greenhouse which will be constructed in downtown Seattle is meant to act as a retreat for employees as well as housing 3,000 species of plants, many of them endangered.

“When they open in early 2018, the spheres will be packed with a plant collection worthy of top-notch conservatories, allowing Amazon employees to amble through tree canopies three stories off the ground, meet with colleagues in rooms with walls made from vines and eat kale Caesar salads next to an indoor creek,” reports New York Times.

The company hasn’t divulged on the approximate cost of the greenhouse but it would be accessible to Amazon employees only; the company may, however, eventually allow public tours.

“The whole idea was to get people to think more creatively, maybe come up with a new idea they wouldn’t have if they were just in their office,” said Dale Alberda, the lead architect on the project at NBBJ, a firm that has also worked on building projects for Samsung, Google and the Chinese internet company Tencent.

In recent past, many tech companies have been trying ways to make workplaces more conducive to creativity. Some turn their offices into grown-up playgrounds, with beanbag chairs, ball pits and Ping-Pong tables.

A Wordsworthian retreat into nature is latest to catch everyone’s imagination. Apple has also hired an arborist, Dave Muffly, to oversee the planting of about 8,000 trees on its new 176-acre campus in Cupertino, Calif., which will surround a spaceship-shaped new building where Apple employees will work. The mostly native trees are intended to restore the natural landscape that once blanketed Silicon Valley.