CLUBHOUSE RULES
Clubhouse Rules
You can have anything you want, as long as it’s salad
By Maria Johnson • Photographs by Bert VanderVeen
Gracious hostess that she is, my neighbor, Olivia Bonino, ushers me into her kitchen, the birthplace of many meals that she serves to guests who frequent the airy abode she shares with her younger brother, Connor.
Connor doesn’t cook much, but he does add a certain dinosaur-fueled pizzazz to the place.
Sitting at her plywood island, Olivia continues on the subject of food.
“This is where we prep it. Then they eat it. Some of it,” she says, explaining that her specialty is salad made from store-bought fruit such as blueberries, blackberries and grapes, along with “cucamelon,” a small hybrid cucumber that grows in her yard, plus a “secret ingredient.”
With that, she reaches out, grabs a branch of a scraggly plant growing at the edge of her kitchen, and pulls it closer to indicate that this is the good stuff.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Not sure,” Olivia says, adding that a guest once tasted it, and “he did not throw up or get sick,” so it has been a staple of her salads ever since.
A first-grader, Olivia saunters out of the kitchen to show off more features of her domicile, which she breezily calls a “clubhouse.” Others might call it a playhouse. Or a tree fort.
Call it what you will. It is her home away from home — like, 40 feet away from her official home — but it’s as much a refuge as any home, anywhere, at any price point.
The tour proceeds.
Here on the south side of the house, she explains, we have the climbing wall.
Here, on the north side, we have the wavy slide. She grabs a cord that dangles above the slide and demonstrates how, after descending, one might pull oneself back up the slide for another go, or, if she took a notion, rappel down the slide backward.
“That’s my favorite thing to do: walk backward,” she says.
We ascend the stairs to the second level, part the beaded curtains made from recycled ball-pit balls, and step into the 9-by-11-foot great room.
The view is stunning, taking in the emerald green outfield and part of the red clay infield of Greensboro Day School’s baseball diamond.
This was the home-run view that the builders — Olivia’s parents, Dominic Bonino of Greensboro’s Bonino Construction and his wife, Laura — wanted to highlight when they started making Olivia and Connor’s rustic haven in the fall of 2022, two years after moving into their home off Lake Brandt Road.
Olivia was 2 when the family relocated and Connor was not yet born, but Laura already had designs on a backyard getaway for the kids — and, occasionally, for the adults.
She was tickled to live next to a baseball field, given her family history. Her grandfather on her father’s side, Ken Keiper, was a well-known player, coach and scout in Western Pennsylvania. He was inducted into the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown’s sports hall of fame in 2014. Laura remembers attending games as a child.
Moving in next to a baseball field as an adult, she was excited about watching games with her own young family. A couple of years after Connor was born, she pitched her idea to Dominic.
He had a blueprint in his head. It called for a deck, lofted and braced on three corners. The fourth corner would be bolted to a mature maple tree. Floating 6 feet above ground — high enough to see over the privacy fence — the deck would feature proper stairs, double-framed railings inset with welded wire and a gabled roof pierced by one of the maple’s limbs.
In the span of four months, mostly on fair-weather weekends, Dominic roughed in the perch. He asked his roofing subcontractor to send over a crew to shingle the gable and make it watertight around the branch. He asked several times.
“I think he was wondering if it was some kind of janky thing that wouldn’t support their weight,” says Dominic, who finally sent pictures of his craftsmanship.
“If I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it right,” he says. “I wanted it to be sound enough to where, if we wanted to get 10 adults up there, we could.”
Convinced, the roofer dispatched a crew. They gave the clubhouse a proper roof and used a vent boot and flashing tape to seal the hole around the tree branch, giving the maple room to sway and grow.
Soon, a wavy slide and climbing wall sprouted at the sides of the clubhouse. Laura gathered furniture and accessories, picking up pieces from family, dollar stores and the local Buy Nothing Project, an app that promotes member giveaways.
So far, her haul includes colorful handholds and footholds for the climbing wall.
Small plastic tables and chairs.
A couple of pillows that say “Relax.”
A thermometer that promises “Butterfly Kisses and Rose Petal Wishes.”
A plastic mirror salvaged from a baby’s crib.
A string of star-shaped lights, solar powered.
A dinner bell.
An eight-note xylophone for a doorbell.
A pouch-style mailbox.
A couple of John Deere license plates from her grandparents’ farm.
And a set of gymnastics mats, which Olivia, Connor and their friends pitch as an A-frame hut used chiefly for spying, Olivia says.
“By the way,” she says, nodding toward my yard. “Your bird feeder looks pretty low on food.”
When Olivia, her brother, and a constantly rising and falling tide of neighborhood kids are not spying and serving salads, they are often sitting at small tables, working on art projects. Sometimes, their creativity spills over to the deck railings, which are decorated with rainbows, illustrated menu items and other childhood hieroglyphics rendered in crayon and colored pencil.
And, oh, they watch baseball games.
They pull for the home team, the Bengals, during their spring season.
“Ben-GALS, Ben-GALS, Ben-GALS,” the pint-sized fans chant.
Once in a rare while, if they like the opposing team’s uniforms, they’ll allow a cheer for the visitors.
But they’re a heavily partisan group. If the Bengals are down, they have been known to heckle the other side.
“Your pitcher has a big butt,” they taunt.
Occasionally, Laura and Dominic call down their charges.
But that rarely happens because of the house rules, which Olivia distills to their essence:
1. No jumping or name-calling from the platform.
2. No ratting out people who break Rule 1.
Seated in tiny Adirondack chairs approximately 4 inches off the ground— I’ll worry about how to stand up later — Olivia and I take in the extraordinary view from her living area late one summer afternoon.
Cumulus clouds climb in the distance.
Traffic swishes by on a nearby road.
A breeze sighs through the leaves, casting a filigree of shadows on the pressure treated boards before our feet.
Does Olivia wish for more in her home?
Of course.
An elevator would be nice, she says.
And refrigerator.
And a bathroom.
And a zip line.
Still, these 99 square feet —198 if you count the ground-floor kitchen — give her what she needs.
A place to rest.
A place to create.
A place to wonder.
“It’s my mini-home,” she says.