BARNARD BARN
Barnard Barn is the adaptive re-use of a simple, wood-framed horse barn for a photographer and painter who recently returned to her home state of Vermont. The barn sits on a mountainside overlooking a pond and hemlock forest: an un-insulated timber shell with board and batten siding, an asphalt shingle roof, and horse stalls made of rough-sawn pine boards. CoPa provided a complete re-design of the barn, as well as a trio of custom-built items: a moving work table, a desk / storage rack, and a base for a reclaimed soapstone sink.
What started as a simple conversation about sustainable, low embodied carbon insulation turned into a guiding ethos for the entire project: protecting against Vermont’s harsh winters and wet springs through developing a new envelope for the building using renewable, bio-based materials, while preserving the majority of the barn’s original structure. The barn’s interior was reorganized to open up the hay loft into a double-height studio space, while providing a small workroom and lofted reading area.
While typical building envelopes rely on foam, fiberglass, or industrial slag byproducts for insulation, we chose to embrace a biodegradable, low-carbon hemp-based insulation product.
Hemp lines the walls and roof of the barn; made from the fibrous husks and stems of the hemp plant; these hemp battens can be cut and installed the same as the “traditional” synthetic products, but without requiring protective gear or special handling for the workers’ protection, lowering the barriers to adoption and eliminating the need for specialized crews and tools.
Hemlock pine forests prevail near the site, and a local sawmill was able to provide rough-sawn boards for the barn’s new exterior siding, as well as for the ceiling and select walls, and a massive, monolithic bench in the studio. In lieu of traditional drywall, paper-pulp homasote panels clad the studio’s working areas, providing a tack-able yet recyclable surface; triple-pane, insulated windows complete the barn’s new envelope.
The result is a testament to the potential of new bio-based materials hybridizing with more traditional means and methods of construction. While normally these negotiations between new and old are covered up during the course of renovations, the Barn features a false polycarbonate skylight in the ceiling’s hemlock boards above a set of preserved stairs: revealing the hemp insulation and original rafters beyond.
