Barn renovation and barn conversion in France

Barn Renovation and Conversion

There are some special considerations for barn conversion and barn renovations that do not arise with a house based project. Although some of these have been mentioned in their specific pages, here I will give an overview of the main things to be considered.

Space

Much the biggest challenge of a barn renovation is using the space available to its best advantage.

Typically an unconverted barn will have several metres of headroom, and a floor area of 120-250 square metres. That is a lot of space, and there are two fundamentally different approaches that are taken. The first essentially aims to build a conventional house within the barn shell, and the second aims to keep the barn 'as a barn'. There is also a middle path that attempts to combine the best of both options, but in practice leans towards one or the other of the first options.

 

A house within a barn

Because of the headroom it is generally straightforward to add a first floor (second floor for US readers) within a barn. The barn of 150 square metres now has a floor space of 300 square metres, more than enough for most of us. The bedrooms upstairs will have interesting ceilings and plenty of character from the woodwork.

However in the examples I have seen the price is too high, in terms of lack of interest in the downstairs rooms, and the loss of that feeling of space that a barn has. Large rooms with low ceilings, both upstairs and downstairs, may seem poorly proportioned.

 

A barn within a barn

The alternative is to keep the full height of the barn visible. This makes a magnificent lounge and kitchen, but what about the bedrooms? A series of boxes built downstairs perhaps, but these are difficult to make look good and may spoil the interior. And since you are keeping the full height you do not gain the extra 150 square metres that an upstairs will provide.

 

The middle road

The middle road has two options, and both can work very well.

In the first (the option we chose for our own barn conversion), the bedrooms occupy half of the downstairs. The lounge is then on top of these bedrooms, and open plan (from above) to the kitchen, which is in the other half of the downstairs area. So on entering the barn you can see the whole space and the full height, and from the lounge you can look down on the space. At least part of the lounge will have quite low ceilings (at the edge where the roof slopes down to the walls) giving a feeling of intimacy in a large space.

The second option is to build a full height wall the whole length of the barn, cutting off perhaps one third of the area available. In this third of the barn there will be bedrooms and bathrooms both upstairs and downstairs if required. The upstairs could have a balcony running along the edge so that on leaving a bedroom you are treated to the sight of the remaining open interior space. If space permits, a part of the downstairs can be reserved as a 'cosy' lounge. This would permit a television to be on for the children, say, without disturbing the peace throughout the whole barn.

I have also seen a barn where the barn was divided into three by two walls running the length of the space. The central space, full height, contained the kitchen and some seating. There were arches leading off this central strip into various lounge type rooms and bedrooms. Large french windows at either end of the central strip allowed the light to flood in. It was a large barn though!

 

Overall

Clearly various combinations and variants of the above could be suitable. Try and picture the descriptions above in your own space as you decide how to split it up. Try and avoid abandoning the fundamental appeal of the barn in a race to get more square metres of floor space - 200 square metres of well planned space is better than 300 square metres of badly planned space. Last - think about it for at least a week after you decide. If you are like us you will change your mind several times. And even now, a year later, I still don't know which approach I would take in another barn conversion, although we are all very happy with our current layout.