This article takes current international interest in the treehouse dwellings built by Korowai of West Papua as a prompt for asking how Korowai themselves aesthetically understand their houses. I suggest treehouses can aptly be described as artworks for Korowai, in the sense that numerous surrounding categories and principles of people's lives are poetically superimposed in sensory experience of the physical buildings. Specifically, I survey ways that houses represent temporality, social belonging, and fear of death. Documenting these elements' presence in Korowai experience of a houses' material form, I argue also that felt ‘indexical’ links of causation or spatiotemporal contiguity are a central mode of representation through which houses have their force, intertwined with iconic links. Korowai aesthetic experience of houses also underscores the figurative and culturally mediated character of acts of material sensation.