A Faithful Barn Conversion

Mark Stevens likes to get things right. A skilled plasterer, he now works as a general builder, special - ising in restoring old houses. However, things were rather different five years ago when he and his partner, Kay Meacher, bought a listed oak framed barn – parts of which are believed to date from the 15th century – in a village near Guildford, Surrey and set about converting it into a house.

Mark had just spent six years on a major domestic project management job and after this change of course the prospect of reverting to doing all the work himself did not at first appeal. “By and large I think people should stick to their own trade so I decided initially to employ different skills and keep mainly to the work for which I am trained,” he says.

However, he and Kay were so disillusioned by some of the tradespeople they initially employed – especially the specialist oak frame repairers who cost them £13,000 for six days’ work – that they decided to undertake the rest of the project themselves, with the aid of Mark’s wealth of experience, and a skilled contract groundworker and jack-of-all-trades, George Suciu.

Today, nearly two years after the job was completed, Kay and Mark are confident that the building, which was approaching dereliction and on the county ‘At Risk’ register when they bought it in 2003, is all set to enjoy several hundred more years of existence.

They have gained particular satisfaction from knowing that they had succeeded in preserving the feel and character of the building. “It was not a house and had never been lived in,” Mark explains. “It was an agricultural building. We wanted to keep it as it was as much as possible — only convert it into a house. So we quite deliberately kept virtually everything. We left bits of odd timber in, bolts in — all the bits and pieces that somehow get attached over several hundred years as a working farm outbuilding.”

The way they undertook the restoration was radically different from that of a builder/developer who would wish to sell it on at a good profit. Mark explains: “If our house had been bought by a spec builder intent on restoring it and selling it on, I am certain he would simply have studded most of it out internally in order to remove all the irregularities from the walls. That would have been a quick and easy solution, but in a small building like this it would have wasted an awful lot of space as well as destroying most of the character.”

Mark went to enormous lengths to achieve the look he wanted. This included rebuilding all the ground floor brick infill panels. At first he hired a skilled bricklayer, but he made the sections too perfect and so had to go. Mark, who has laid bricks in the past but is far from a skilled brickie, made a point of not using the best of the bricks that were there before and created an interesting mix.

He also preserved all the natural dips, curves and odd angles in the frame by several different types of subterfuge. Chief among these was the use of a system involving 5mm twisted stainless steel rods to hold the corners together. Only the smallest signs of these are visible, in the form of barely discernible plugs of resin — the material used to encase the stainless steel bars.

The barn was in such a state that arch traditionalist Mark had to go against his ‘lime lover’ philosophy and use a strong concrete mix in the underpinning he carried out all round. “I had to stop the movement,” he says. “I knew that successful underpinning was the key to getting everything else to hold together.”

Today you will see a cunningly built ‘haunch’ — a sort of mini buttresses one brick ‘thick’ and five courses high, with an angled top capped with a tile. This marks the top of the underpinning.

“We even managed to repair the brick panels by the front door, which lean out,” Mark says. “The conservation experts didn’t think I’d be able to dig underneath and underpin this section without it collapsing, but I did!” The windows follow the line of the wall and are ‘eyed in’ rather than being perfectly level. “If they had been put in perfectly square they just wouldn’t have looked right,” he explains.

Mark tidied up the first floor and greatly reduced the fall in the floor in the master bedroom while still leaving it far from level. He insulated the walls internally using 500mm rigid foam wrapped in mesh, which he covered with lime plaster

The roof also needed radical repairs. As he was keen to keep the original rafters exposed as a feature, Mark devised a scheme which involved placing the insulation above them. He achieved this by placing a galvanised steel mesh above the rafters so that he could plaster beneath. Above this was a vapour barrier, 12.5mm ply to stiffen up the whole structure, a 50mm air gap, a layer of foil-covered quilted insulation battening, a breathable membrane and above this the tiles.

The original rafters run beneath the three conservation-grade rooflights, which is, to quote Mark, “pretty unusual.” Even more unusual is that he has managed to preserve the heavily ‘racked’ (out of true) rafters in the roof where they can be seen by all.

The only major structural alteration was the removal of the first floor in the middle bay, to provide a two storey space. Kay and Mark were able to gain permission for this because it was in the newer part of the building. “I guess the local conservation officer, with whom we had an excellent relationship throughout, realised she was getting 95 per cent of what she was after, so we had no problems with removing it,” Kay says.

When it came to the internal layout – Kay’s responsibility – there were many problems to solve. “At first I was not in favour of the dual-height hall space because it would have avoided the need for the two staircases we have had to install,” Kay explains. “However, that would have meant cutting roof trusses, which would have caused all sorts of problems, and in any case would not have been permitted. It would also have made the building much darker inside than it is now. I believe the central atrium space with the two narrow staircases was a good trade-off.”

This is a conversion that has achieved just about the maximum in a relatively small and very difficult space. However, all this has come at a price — £2,150 a square metre. “We deliberately went for a very high spec as we were going to live in the building,” Kay explains.

“I can’t stress enough the amount of time it took,” says Mark. “I seriously underestimated the amount of labour it would take to achieve the standard we desired. It is unlikely we would make a loss if we were to sell the house; however, this has been the sort of project that is not really financially viable unless you choose to live in it.” But then, as Kay succinctly puts it: “It would have been a crime to enter into this half-heartedly.”

Building ‘Out of True’

Kay and Mark’s barn conversion is a perfect example of how to build ‘out of true’, which basically means building ‘imperfectly’ in order to preserve or create character in a building. Mark actually sacked his brickie for relaying panels too neatly. “My aim was to make it look as far as possible as it had looked before,” he says. “The panels I rebuilt were not as neat as those done by the brickie, but they look older!” As an aid to this he took photographs of the panels before starting work, and replaced many of the bricks in exactly the same position in the panel. Mark also retained all the heavily racked rafters in the roof, the crazy dips and curves and odd angles that had been produced by twists and turns in the frame over several hundred years, and also ensured the windows were not perfectly square. “So often nowadays old houses are immediately ‘straightened’ when they are being renovated and restored,” he says. “It takes an awful lot more time, thought and skill to retain all the old twists and curves that fate has injected into the building over the years and that add so much to its character.”

Further reading:

• A Guide to Converting Barns
• A Converted Brick Barn
• A Barn Conversion in Oxfordshire