Barn into a House

An early 20th-century agricultural and livestock construction in a town of the Castilian plain has been transformed into a dwelling.

The intervention preserves the identity of the farming facility and the vernacular character of the construction. The bay of the barn harnesses thermal energy through the inertia of the adobe wall. The roof is insulated and waterproofed by means of a sandwich panel inserted between the old tiles and the frame of logs and wood-shake boards. Changing the corrugated panel for a polycarbonate one, a skylight over the stairs brightens up the spaces upstairs and down.

To take advantage of the free height without altering the original massing, a lightweight slab of exposed metal beams and sandwich panels is put in, but the total height is maintained at both ends of the barn, with the staircase on one side and a room on the other. The second bay, where the cellar was, had three timber trusses. Because of leaks, one of them had deteriorated. It was removed, and a central courtyard was created to form an outdoor space beside the kitchen.