HOMEOWNERS NEWSLETTER

"We wanted a comfortable, easy house in which to live and entertain. Our Yankee Barn came out just the way we wanted. The result is beyond our expectations."

To learn how you can design your own barn home, order our Design Guide which includes 175 pages of design ideas, color photographs, interviews with homeowners, and custom plans.

"As soon as we walked in, we fell in love with Yankee Barn," said Nancy. She and her husband Tom wanted to build a vacation home on their property in the mountains of southern Vermont. "We realized we could have the post and beam country home we wanted. "

"We didn’t want a rustic, log cabin type house," she said. "We wanted a comfortable, easy house in which to live and entertain."

After looking at other post and beam companies and custom builders, they saw Yankee Barn in a magazine, sent away for the Design Guide, and took Yankee Barn up on their offer to spend the night in their model home, the Gathering House. Yankee Barn was the perfect fit for their site and lifestyle. "We wanted a home that would fit our rural site, but was finished with an elegant look, what one could call a casual elegance," said Tom.

Tom and Nancy sat down with Michael Beaulieu, one of the Yankee Barn designers, and explained what they wanted in their vacation home. They wanted a layout similar to the Gathering House, a place for the generations of their family to gather.

"The layout challenge was to have the rooms take advantage of the views in two directions," said Tom. Their property had two points of interest. In one direction, the view swept up a mountain. In the opposite direction, a pond surrounded by woods was home to wildlife from songbirds to moose.

To take advantage of the mountain view, Tom and Nancy designed a center Great Room with a bump out dormer to accommodate the large roundtop window. For the early morning view of wildlife across the pond, they added a granary and greenhouse to enclose the kitchen and breakfast area.

The master bedroom located in an ell has views in both directions. On the second floor, they designed two guest bedrooms, each with a separate bath and balcony with views of the mountain. On the attic level, they added a walkway to connect two sleeping spaces.

"We have views from every level out the large window to the mountain—from the Great Room, the balcony, and the third floor walkway," said Tom.

A smaller Yankee Barn serves as a guest house and garage. The guest house is framed with the more rustic rough-sawn beams to give the area a different feel from the main house with its smooth-planed beams. The second floor serves as a self-contained guest area with kitchen. The walkway connecting the barn with the house and the sun porch were built from timber cut on the property, and milled to specifications.

"Yankee Barn has been responsive to our needs and questions," said Tom. "They allowed us many changes. They were easy to work with and did everything we asked."

Yankee Barn’s award winning Web site is a recognized resource for information about "barn homes." A favorite area on the site has been the House Plans section. Yankee Barn has recently expanded this section. With a membership to the Neighborhood, users will now have access to over 100 plans, plus photo albums of six homes providing a virtual tour. Anyone who purchases the Yankee Barn Design Guide or our book, Barn Style Homes: Design Ideas for Timber Frame Houses, will be automatically registered.

To provide interactive tools during the design process, Yankee Barn has developed a KeyClub section of the Web site. A design deposit will initiate on-line detailed planning discussions and drafting of initial design plans. In barnSpecs, KeyClub members can work on-line with the help of Yankee Barn staff to make choices for the look and feel of their home.

With the New England summer just around the corner, Yankee Barn is busy building for fall deliveries. Nearly booked for the fall, the shop is taking orders for winter deliveries.

"Winter is a great time to build," said Bob Mahoney, Senior Project Manager at Yankee Barn Homes. Bob should know—he built an ell addition during one of the coldest, snowiest winters of recent history. "We broke ground the first week in February. The structure was up in three days, and the builder was working inside, in a nice cozy environment."

"I would build in the winter again. Contractors are more available during the winter months, and I didn’t have to worry about mud season, or black flies."

A Yankee Barn has endless design possibilities. Each homeowner starts with a basic frame then can add frame extensions and dormers for extra width, height, or rooms. Many homeowners find the G" scale building blocks representing the frames and frame extensions helpful in visualizing designs.

"As we talked through what we wanted, we played with the block set," said Tom. "We could move things around easily and see how it might work."

First the homeowner chooses the basic frame to enclose the living space. In this home, Tom and Nancy chose the Prairie Barn with the popular third floor attic. They added 4' to the standard 48' frame.Next, homeowners choose from many frame extensions to add extra width or rooms.

"We could work the blocks around, trying different things," said Nancy.

For a large kitchen and breakfast area like the Show Home, they added a 34' granary and 18' greenhouse along one side. They wanted a private master bedroom suite and chose a 32' ell. For their garage with guest quarters upstairs, they selected a 36' guest house connected to the house by a covered breezeway.

Dormers can be added to accommodate height and add width. By adding a dormer with a bump out, Tom and Nancy created a large center Great Room and raised the side wall to accommodate the roundtop window facing the view. Two dormers were added on the second floor for access to balconies from the guest bedrooms.

Photographs: Suki Coughlin, Stylist: Paula McFarland
©2003 Yankee Barn Homes, Tony Hanslin, Chairman and CEO