After hearing developer Frank McKinney's lawyer make a final plea for mercy, the Historic Preservation Board unanimously voted to deny a retroactive request for permission to build the elaborate treehouse. In June, the board asked McKinney to submit plans for the treehouse he already had built in front of his historic beachside home, a 1936 Cape Cod-style cottage inspired by cartoonist Fontaine Fox's Toonerville Trolley strip.

"I think this was just a project that got a little bit out of control," said McKinney's lawyer, Rebecca Henderson, who came brandishing a Smithsonian magazine article titled Tree Houses, Take a Bough. "We got to the end, when it was finished, and no one had mentioned building permits."

McKinney, who makes a living building mega-mansions, just wanted a treehouse, Henderson said. She's considering several courses of action, including an appeal to the city commission.

The board's main beef with the treehouse wasn't its design. Styled after the historic home, it has French doors, a gabled roof, a rope bridge extending to the main house and a staircase leading 23 feet up from the ground.

The problem, historic preservationist Wendy Shay, is that it blocks the front of the main house. "This structure is in the wrong place," Shay said. "It needs to be relocated."

Henderson said the McKinneys couldn't do that. The house is too entangled with the tree, she said. It would have to be destroyed. Shay countered that the tree does not support the house.

Henderson showed pictures that she said proved passersby could not see the main house, much less the treehouse, both of which are hidden by towering sea grape trees. The board said the trees were irrelevant -- the next owner could trim them or a hurricane could uproot them, though federal law protects sea grapes from destruction.

The home's previous owners made changes and renovations to the main house, Henderson said, so her client should be able to do the same.

"We like to think of this as the somewhat quirky and beautiful addition by the McKinneys to the house," she said.

The board needed to consider McKinney's application as if the treehouse did not exist, board member William Branning said.

"I would not support it under those circumstances," he said, "and I can't support it today."