kitchen, dining and sitting room areas. For the calving shed, a more conventional approach was adopted. Many of the original timbers were found to be less precious and not worthy of preservation.
In fact, the The Barns at Lynch Farm
The Barns at Lynch Farm are the second phase of an ongoing project to convert a redundant former dairy farm into a single family dwelling house. Located in
an Area of Outstanding
Natural Beauty, the site consists of four original
farm buildings - farmhouse,
threshing barn, calving shed and milking parlour - arranged around an agricultural courtyard. The farmhouse, threshing barn and calving shed each have grade II listed status. The original brief to project architects Jeremy King was to convert the three farm buildings into habitable accommodation and link them back to the original farmhouse. Initially, this was a difficult concept for the Local Planning and Conservation Department to accept. However, through an open dialogue with the Department’s Conservation Officer, together with an understanding that the buildings would be sympathetically conserved
and deliberately restored
to appear as a collection of ‘working’ agricultural original
buildings (close to their appearance), the Department
finally gave Planning and Listed Building Approval for the project in early 2012. The first phase of the building work - the conversion of the unlisted milking parlour - was carried out in 2012/13. The second phase involving the restoration of the two barns - threshing barn and calving shed - followed soon afterwards and was completed in 2016.
Being of timber structure both buildings posed profound challenges in terms of conservation and repair.
However, the
threshing barn, the most complete and intact of the two, was found to be on the point of near collapse, being held up by a single telegraph pole situated inside the
building, propping up a broken main truss. As a consequence of this damage, the building had become ‘kink’ shape in form, with parts of the external wall undulating and leaning precariously out of plumb. In giving consent for the project, the Planning and Conservation Department had insisted that these visual ‘characteristics’ should remain preserved in the restored building. Furthermore they had insisted that all the
internal timbers were to remain
visible in the new interior. This was to pose a significant technical conundrum: how to maintain these timbers whilst, at the same time, complying with up to date structural loading requirements (this was particularly the case with the roof timbers which were found to be simple ‘split’ field posts with no intrinsic structural characteristics).
The solution was to over clad the original building
with a laminated and glued timber shell structure -similar in concept to papier mache construction - using small, thin, sections of timber, to follow the shape of the original building. The first layer consisted of three layers of 6.5mm thick birch face plywood bonded together using PVA glue. On top of that, a series of timber ‘ribs’ were built, spaced at 600mm centres (with insulation fitted in-between) which were formed from 25mm thick sections of Douglas Fir timber bonded together. With the ribs in place, the original structure was pinned back to the new frame thus capturing
every nuance of the semi
collapsed form and locking it in place. This structural solution enabled the building’s original timber cladding to be kept in situ and to form the interior wall lining of the new space.
The restored building now houses a single space containing the
surreymagazineonline.co.uk 19
entire building was found to be a hybrid of a number of former, cannibalised, timber structures, with the majority of the timbers dating from the 1970’s and 80’s. As a result, the structural solution was to introduce a new timber frame built around a number of carefully selected historical timbers which were to remain in place. The calving shed now houses a suite of bedrooms and sitting room space for the owner’s family. The third element of the build was to link to the two buildings together. Within the overall masterplan for the property small, discrete extensions are placed in the two corners of the courtyard. The first of these extensions has been built in this second phase of the build, linking the two barns together
and incorporating delicately
glazed link structures which ‘plug’ into former doorways to the original buildings. This new extension provides additional vestibule and cloakroom spaces and acts a ‘front door’ to a new driveway created away from the historical courtyard. The project possesses highly sustainable credentials: a high degree of airtightness to the building envelope, insulation with a ‘U’ value that exceeds the requirements of current Building Regulations together with a ground source heat pump which drives an underfloor heating system throughout the buildings.
www.jeremykingarchitects.com
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