Broomstick Barn

Our Site

About a year ago, my husband and I were walking around our house site with a friend of ours who also happens to be a builder. We were talking about where to site the house — a post-and-beam style barn home we’d designed with the help of Yankee Barn — when the builder mentioned that we might have to think about taking out a lot more trees. “Why?” I asked, looking around at all the beautiful birches and towering pines that lined the edge of the acre we’d already cleared. “Because otherwise your house is going to cast a shadow over everything. Your entire yard will be dark.”

Huh. This was not something we had ever even thought about. So far, all of our attention had been on the interior of our house — the crisscross of roof beams overhead, the placement of the bedrooms, the open loft upstairs, the type of hardwood for the floors. In my imagination, the windows had always overlooked a yard dappled with light — certainly not a gloomy expanse of shadowy meadow.

The problem turned out to be the height of the barn and the alignment of our property along the east-west axis. With a north-facing house, a height of two stories, and a slope in the back, no light from the south would ever be able to reach the cleared area at the front of our house. And that was a problem — especially for two people who had spent over five years living in the shadowy confines of a pre-war apartment in New York City.

The red barn we’d spent so much time designing now seemed dark and spooky. The project which had taken up so much of our imagination now seemed doomed forever. For the first time, my husband and I talked about throwing in the towel. We started thinking about all the things we could do with the money we would save by not building a house. Trips to the south of France. Designer wardrobes. Alms for the poor.

Hope came in the form of Dwell Magazine. Pages and pages of sleek modern houses made of steel and glass. Each and every one of them flooded with light and possibility. And one in particular that seemed to offer everything the Yankee Barn did not. A long metal rectangle called the LVL from Rocio Romero.