CONFUSION
Originally the Treehouse Villas were part of the Disney Institution and before that um well they have been around from the beginning. Thanks Disney for confusing me...........
It will have to be ADA compatable of course but not seeing anything specially targetting the disabled.
They were around since almost the beginning of WDW; first as a regular resort and later as part of the Disney Institute.
Most recently, they were used as housing for International Intern CMs at WDW. I don't think that's what the program was called, but it was International CMs.
Will they be new construction, or are they just making the footprint base smaller? I thought that they couldn't tear them down and rebuild them, as the regulations wouldn't allow anyhting new to be built there these days. They could do a ton of work and call it 'cosmetic rehab' and not change the basic layout.
I also remember seeing a few treehouses with ramps - local.live doesn't have any good shots of the treehouses though. Maybe google does?
They totally pulled them down. A lot of them had been damaged in hurricanes over the last 10 years, so they needed to do more than just renovate them.
The original Treehouses had 2 floors of usable space. The main level was entered from an outside deck. The lower level had a bedroom and a utility room. It was accessed by a winding staircase from the living room. From what I have read, one of the problems was that the area was in a flood plane, so the lower floor could flood.
This is a picture of the original. You can see how big the 'footprint' is and how taking that downstairs room away would change it compared to the drawing that mechurchlady posted:
By getting rid of the lower level 'living space' , the footprint was made smaller and they got rid of the flooding problem. I think both of those things might have been part of the negotiations that allowed them to be built.
Other people beside you have mentioned remembering some Treehouses with ramps. Since they were still in use by guests until the early 2000s, chances are good that some were accessible, even if they were not that way to start with.
I've done a bunch of google searches and have not found anything. I do have a 1994 Birnbaum Official Guide to WDW which lists the Treehouses as part of the "Disney Village Resort." Of those, it says only the Club Suites and Fairview Villas offer accessible villas (which makes it sound like there were no handicapped accessible Treehouses in 1994).
I have read though that they added accessibility to some after that, or possibly when the students were living there.
I do know there was a major rebuilding (taking some of them down to bare studs) in maybe 1998 -2000. I can't remember just when it was, but we were at WDW twice that year and saw them pulled down to bare studs.
But, anyway, as I posted, it would not be difficult to make some accessible.
And, they would only need to make a few accessible.
