The prospect of retirement doesn’t just signal the end of a career; it offers the chance to recalibrate and re-prioritize in life.
7 Modern Farmhouses
November 20, 2013
Today we venture out to the American, Canadian and English countryside to view inventive, modern takes on a venerable architectural archetype: the farmhouse. These elegant, gabled structures offer tangible evidence that modernism can flourish among the cornfields.
Lauren Ewing’s stylish but unassuming shotgun-style house in Vincennes, Indiana, is set into a hill overlooking a field she has known since childhood. Photo by Kyoko Hamada.
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Originally appeared in Bringing It All Back Home
When a couple approached Cindy Rendely, a Toronto architect, to design a farmhouse for them in the rural Northumberland County, Ontario, countryside, it took some convincing—and cries of "modern doesn't mean flat"—for her to agree that a sloped roof would work for the design of this weekend retreat. Now that it is finished, Rendely, who is also a product designer, prides herself on the way the house sits in the landscape like an object, with views directed toward Lake Ontario. Photo by Tom Arban.
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Originally appeared in The Farm by Cindy Rendely
Montrealers Yves Bériault and Diane Decoste worked with the Montreal firm YH2 to update their 1,690-square-foot vacation home in Havre-Aux-Maisons, in Canada's Magdalen Islands, into a modern retreat. The renovation work revealed that the house, first built in 1915 as a one-room schoolhouse, had a spectacular arched open space hidden above a false ceiling. Photo by Matthew Monteith.
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Matthew Monteith
Subverting the traditional, conservatively cozy British barn conversion, Carl Turner created a getaway in rural Norfolk, England, for himself and his friends to visit, repose, and consider the beauty of agrarian minimalism. Photo by Christoffer Rudquist.
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Originally appeared in A Pair of English Barns Hide Unabashedly Bold and Budget-Friendly Minimalist Interiors
Joanna and Geoff Mouming built this modern incarnation of a farmhouse on 55 acres overlooking corn, soybeans, and barns in the countryside outside Iowa City with help from John DeForest, an architect based in Seattle. Photo by Mark Mahaney.
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Originally appeared in Farm Fresh
After years of city living, Maggie Treanor now is surrounded by cornfields in her 925-square-foot farmhouse in a rural corner of Huron County, Ontario. The structure house blends into the landscape somewhat; with a galvanized steel shed roof and siding, it looks like a high-design little brother to the barns on the surrounding farms. Photo by Derek Shapton.
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Originally appeared in The Off-Grid Home That Doesn't Worry About Too Many Gadgets
Architect Chad Everhart his wife, April, bought a run-down, Depression-era farm house on two acres near Boone, North Carolina. They demolished the old structure - salvaging some hemlock and chestnut flooring, and some planks of white pine – and set about rebuilding on the original concrete block foundation. The form hasn’t changed much. Everhart and his team added a porch to each end – one for dining, the other for leisure – and a pair of what he calls “bump-outs,” or saddlebags, on the sides to extend interior spaces by a few feet. The roof pitch remains the same. “The inspiration was to keep it small," Everhart says. "That’s the way people live out here. Smaller means more manageable.” Image Courtesy Chad Everhart Architect.
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Courtesy Chad Everhart Architect
Originally appeared in Farm House Redux
Lauren Ewing’s stylish but unassuming shotgun-style house in Vincennes, Indiana, is set into a hill overlooking a field she has known since childhood. Photo by Kyoko Hamada.
Photo by Kyoko Hamada.
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