“It’s fun to have things that are magical,” says Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers founder Todd Graves, standing near a flat-screen TV in the living room of his backyard treehouse. With three levels and a $400,000 price tag, the hangout—nestled in a 100-foot live oak tree among the sprawling gardens of Graves’ Baton Rouge estate—is less a kids’ playplace and more a tree-home fit for a billionaire.
There’s the standard slide and crow’s nest, of course, but also 450 square feet of outdoor deck space and a 400-square-foot living quarters that includes a cushy family room, a spacious bedroom and a functioning half-bathroom. The pine ceiling uses reclaimed wood from an old sewing factory; the well-stocked bar and an ornate stained-glass bedroom window were salvaged from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. A disco ball hangs in the skylight above the bed, a nod to the decor in Graves’ 900-plus chicken finger restaurants. A 70-foot, Ewok-style swinging bridge connects to a lakefront viewing platform overlooking Louisiana State University’s campus.
None of this comes cheap. Inspired by the treehouses and forts he made as a kid, Graves enlisted the help of Pete Nelson, of Washington State-based Nelson Treehouse and Supply, who featured the project—then Nelson’s biggest-ever—in a 2015 episode of the Animal Planet show Treehouse Masters. The roughly $400,000 ($550,000 in today’s dollars) that Graves says he shelled out for his treehouse, which sits between his main house and his 5,000-square-foot guest house, is about as much as typical Americans pay for their actual home. But, given that it cost less than 0.002% of Graves’ $22 billion fortune, it hardly broke the bank.
Plus, like most billionaires’ dealings, it’s also good business. “I can come out here and I can think, clear my head,” says Graves, 53. “It makes me better at Raising Cane’s.”
Then there are the stars. What began as a fun spot for Graves’ two children and the neighborhood kids has become something of a celebrity haunt for A-listers visiting town. Graves—who spends much of his time palling around with celebs 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’ place that he had Nelson build him his own speakeasy-themed treehouse in Georgia. “You can go to someone’s house,” Graves says, “but there aren’t a lot of treehouses like this you can go hang out in.” When Graves’ friend Snoop Dogg did a show in Baton Rouge, he had to drop by the treehouse first. “Todd is family to me,” Snoop says. Between the celebrity attraction and the reruns of Treehouse Masters, Graves figures he’s actually made a profit on his $400,000 splurge.
And his love for the fantastical doesn’t stop here. “I like things with great stories behind them,” says Graves, whose own origin story features plenty of adventure. When no one would fund his idea for a restaurant serving only chicken fingers, Graves famously worked as a boilermaker and in the dangerous salmon fishing trade to finance it himself, bootstrapping all the way to becoming America’s richest restaurateur and one of the 50 richest people in the United States. He’s used some of his chicken finger fortune to buy everything from a 66-million-year-old triceratops skeleton to Harrison Ford’s Raiders of the Lost Ark jacket to a pair of Elvis Presley’s sunglasses. “I just won a bid on one of Napoleon’s hats today,” Graves says, surveying his property from a 35-foot-high treehouse deck. “It keeps me dreaming, man.”