An Old Barn Transforms Into an Elegant, Rustic Home

Transforming an Old Barn into a Modern Home

Take a look inside this barn style home transformation in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The old barn becomes an elegant space for entertaining after Penny Drue Baird teamed with Irwin Weiner, who handled the architectural design, to transform this 19th-century barn on Bairds clients' Bucks County, Pennsylvania, property into a 4,000-square-foot space for entertaining and housing guests. Baird says that when you do a barn, you have a little poetic license. A living area is at one end of the open main floor, with back-to-back sofas separating the living and entertainment areas.

Elegant Interior Features

Inside the stunning renovation, you'll also find Cowtan and Tout floral and diamond-patterned fabrics, along with Ralph Lauren Home lounge chairs. Other features in the barn style home include stark pillow stripes, wing chairs, sofa inset fabrics, and carpet. Baird and Weiner relied on a combination of reclaimed wood from the structure and other sources and patinated new wood for the interiors, including the kitchen cabinets. The designer reused every piece they could. Limestone replaced the oak flooring, some of which became the dining table. In the rear facade, you'll find boards from the interior replacing the crumbling ones on the exterior where large expanses of windows were added. John Morgan Thomas was a landscape architect. Throughout the house, Baird balanced the rustic with the sophisticated, she found the headboards in one of the two sleeping lofts at the Paris flea market. The barn-style house also has a second sleeping loft.

Distinctive Barn Features

There are plenty of details that give barn style homes their unique look and design. Most barns and barn style homes are proportioned to look tall. Many barns are rectangular with pitched roofs, although gambrel roofs are also somewhat common. Other common features in a barn include cupolas and/or weathervanes which often adorn the roofline of a barn or barn style home. Cupolas are often centered, as pulling them forward towards the front of the barn building evokes the silhouette of a church. Large barn style homes often have multiple cupolas to fit the scale of the frame size.

Post and Beam Construction

Another feature of many barns is post and beam construction. It could probably go without saying that post and beam construction is an essential element of a barn-style house. When you walk into a barn, the first thing you notice is the heavy beam frame. Barn frames come in a variety of shapes and sizes. There are king post truss frames and gambrel frames. There is the aptly A-frame, where the roof line and the horizontal cross-tie form the shape of an A. More common is the barn frame where the roof line is also shaped like an upside-down V but there is an upside-down U-shaped beam structure on which the roof sits. The Gambrel barn frame affords more height and headroom at the roof line. The heavy timber frame is often the dominant feature of a barn's interior. Naturally, heavy timber frames are therefore often used by those striving to get that barn-style look and feel on the interior of a barn-style home.