“It’s fun to have magical things,” says Todd Graves, founder of Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, standing next to a flat-screen TV in the living room of his backyard treehouse. With three levels and a price tag of $400,000, this gathering place, nestled in a 100-foot live oak among the sprawling gardens of Graves’ Baton Rouge estate, is less of a playground. for children and more a tree house fit for a billionaire.
It features the standard slide and crow’s nest, of course, but also 450 square feet of outdoor deck and a 400-square-foot living area that includes a comfortable sitting room, a spacious bedroom, and a convenient half-bathroom. The pine roof uses reclaimed wood from an old sewing factory; The well-stocked bar and ornate stained glass window in the bedroom were rescued from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. A disco ball hangs in the skylight above the bed, a nod to the decor of Graves’ more than 900 chicken strip restaurants. A 70-foot Ewok-style suspension bridge connects to a lakefront overlook overlooking the Louisiana State University campus.
None of this is cheap. Inspired by the treehouses and forts he built as a child, Graves enlisted the help of Pete Nelson of Washington state-based Nelson Treehouse and Supply, who featured the project (then Nelson’s largest) on a 2015 episode of the show Treehouse Masters from Animal Planet. The roughly $400,000 ($550,000 today) Graves says he shelled out for his treehouse, which sits between his main house and his 5,000-square-foot guest house, is about the same as the average American pays for his own home. But since it cost less than 0.002% of Graves’ $22 billion fortune, it wasn’t a bust.
Plus, like most billionaire businesses, it’s also a good business. “I can come here and think, clear my mind,” Graves, 53, says. “It makes me better at Raising Cane’s.”
Then there are the stars. What started as a fun hangout for Graves’ two sons and neighborhood kids has become something of a celebrity hangout for celebrities visiting town. Graves, who spends much of his time hanging out with celebrities to promote the Cane’s brand, has hosted the likes of rapper Nelly, NFL star Ja’Marr Chase and basketball great Shaquille O’Neal, who was so inspired by his visit to Graves’ home that he asked Nelson to build him his own speakeasy-themed treehouse in Georgia. “You can go to someone’s house,” Graves says, “but there aren’t many treehouses like this that you can hang out in.” When Graves’ friend Snoop Dogg did a show in Baton Rouge, he had to stop by the treehouse first. “Todd is family to me,” Snoop says. Between celebrity attraction and reruns of Treehouse Masters Graves believes he actually made a profit on his 400,000 splurge.
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Courtesy Todd Graves
And his love for the fantastic doesn’t end here. “I like things with great stories behind them,” says Graves, whose own origin story features plenty of adventure. When no one would finance his idea for a restaurant that only served chicken strips, Graves worked as a boilermaker and in the dangerous business of salmon fishing to finance it himself, working his way up to becoming the richest restaurateur in the United States and one of the 50 richest people in the United States. He’s used some of his chicken strip fortune to buy everything from a 66-million-year-old triceratops skeleton to Harrison Ford’s jacket in Raiders of the lost ark and a pair of Elvis Presley sunglasses. “I just won a bid for one of Napoleon’s hats today,” says Graves, surveying his property from the terrace of a 35-foot-tall treehouse. “It keeps me dreaming, man.”
This article was originally published by Forbes US.
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