IN 1985, THIS RESTORED OLD FARMHOUSE WON THE NEUCHÂTEL HEIMATSCHUTZ AWARD.
THE PAST MEETS THE PRESENT
When architecture bridges the past and the present--or how to span three and a half centuries of history.
Between the original "beautiful room" and the modern living room set up in the former stable, there is only a simple wooden door. And a leap of three hundred and fifty years. But not the slightest jarring transition: just life going on, nestled in the gentle rolling hills of this northern tip of the Val-de-Ruz.
It is a Jura farmhouse, like the few that still remain in the region. Built in 1652, it had belonged, throughout the last century, to the same family of modest farmers, the Scheideggers. When the father died in the 1960s, the mother and daughter continued to live there as they had in the previous century, with just enough electricity and water--which had to be drawn from the cistern. The tiny living area consisted, all in all, of the hearth (the kitchen), the "parlor"--which was only entered on special occasions--and, above it, a small room: "Grandfather's room," which was accessed through a trapdoor by climbing over the stove. Everything else was the barn and the stable, both empty. The house was abandoned in the mid-1970s when, after the mother's death, the daughter had to be placed in a nursing home.
For ten years, Henri and Paule Schneider had been scouring the region in search of a farmhouse to renovate, and they must have passed by this ruin at least ten times: cracked walls, a roof ready to collapse, rotten rafters... What prompted them, on that summer day in 1979, to go take a look inside? And there, in what remained of the kitchen--supporting a blackened hearth where a small wood-burning stove sat, looking rather pitiful--they stopped short before the column: a marvelous corner column of cut stone, carved, intact, as beautiful as the day it was built, supporting a fireplace with a straight lintel. They bought the column... along with the ruin surrounding it. But not before they'd had to dissuade a developer who was planning to turn the site into vacation apartments. Purchase price: 50,000 francs. As a result, Heimatschutz stepped in and immediately designated the facade as a historic landmark. As for the rest... this marked the beginning of an adventure for the intrepid owners, one reminiscent of the story told by Katharina von Arx in Ma Folie Romainmôtier.
Henri Schneider, an ETS-trained watchmaking engineer, and his wife Paule-- "no formal training but plenty of passion"--set out to work with local artisans, rediscovering techniques, relearning traditional methods, and transforming themselves, weekend after weekend, into laborers, masons, carpenters, draftsmen, and historians. First goal: the structural framework. Jean-Louis Geiser, a carpenter from La Ferrière, built the new roof structure, calculated according to modern standards but using traditional construction techniques: six columns, rafters made of fir logs hewn on two sides, and beams and posts fitted and secured with wooden dowels. The 305 m² of roofing will be covered, as it was originally, with 66-cm-long wooden shingles, cut from white fir that Henri Schneider selected in the forest alongside Denis Sauser of La Chaux-du-Milieu, one of the last specialists in this craft (he was awarded the Heimatschutz Prize in 1981).
The façade, which proudly displays the date 1652 on the front porch portal, was in itself a living history book of architecture and history: the superb mullioned window of the "belle chambre," opened in 1673, had been bricked up at a time when tax amounts were determined by the number of windows framed in stone! It will be restored. On the east side, the awning, the roof over the bread oven, and the structure of the grandfather's room on the first floor date from the 18th century. And from
