A Barn-Style Home with Stunning Surroundings

Overview of the Barn-Style Home

Take a look inside of this barn-style home, a collaboration between Paul F. Shurtleff, Thad Hayes, and Douglas Reed in a Field House in New York. The architect, interior designer, and landscape architect worked together to create this elegant farmhouse-inspired home in Upstate New York. The barn building is clad in cedar siding. There are large doors that slide open to reveal the media room continue the farmstead theme. The main house has a formality that feels more outdoorsy. It's hard to believe that the modest structure that landscape architect Douglas Reed, architect Paul F. Shurtleff and interior designer Thad Hayes created together in upstate New York hasn't been there forever with its slight bend in it, a shed roof of the light gray outbuilding slopes down with the terraced yard, a seamless fit with the vernacular farmhouses of the area and the network of fieldstone walls lacing the landscape.

Design Inspiration and Collaboration

Inspired by the footprint of a demolished stable where the designers first shaped the landscape, and the barn-style house followed naturally, taking its cue from an existing tartan of fieldstone walls and hedgerows. The designers were inspired by the traditional elements of the farmstead. The three designers had collaborated here before, designing the main house on this rural property back in 1994. The architectural design itself was inspired by local farmhouses, but, importantly, the landscape architect terraced the grounds so that the tennis court, motor court, outdoor pool, and lawns all occupied their levels within the surrounding meadows.

Expanding the Property

In 2001 the owners, a New York couple with two children, acquired a nearly three-acre property next door, and they asked their three designing tenors back for an encore. Following the lead of the landscape architect, the trio decided to visually connect the new property with the old by recapitulating the fieldstone walls in the new phase. They drew a major landscape wall across the yard to extend the pattern and join the two properties within the larger system of retaining walls, the house straddles the wall.

Creating a Versatile Screening Room

The clients wanted a screening room where family and friends could hole up with popcorn during weekends in the country. The furniture layout is geometric and structured, prompted by the axial geometries of the building. The consistent horizon line of the sofas and chairs orders an interior already calmed by geometry. The clients are very easygoing, but the one requirement was that the rooaccommodateste a mix of uses, it needed to look like a living room part of the time, and for screening movies, the furniture which is oriented to the view out the barn doors and to the fireplace can be reoriented toward the screen. What feels like a lodge becomes transformed into a home theater.

Warm and Inviting Interior Design

Hayes employed a warm palette of darker, richer building materials and colors, appropriate for seasonal use. There is blue plaid on the chairs that play off the leather sofas, which have seat cushions in fabric panels two-tone mix that recalls the 1930s and 1940s automobile seating. It was designed so they could just build a fire, watch a movie and eat popcorn without worrying that buttery fingers would ruin the decor.