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In 1985, this restored old farmhouse won the Neuchâtel Heritage Prize.

Past in the Present

When architecture meets the contemporary past, or how to bridge three and a half centuries of history.

Between the original "beautiful bedroom" and the modern living room installed 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 contrast: just life continuing, nestled in the gentle hills of this northernmost part of the Val-de-Ruz.

It is a Jura farmhouse, one of a 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. After the father's death in the 1960s, the mother and daughter continued to live there as they had in the previous century, with only electricity and water drawn from a cistern. The tiny habitable section consisted solely of the hearth (the kitchen), the "beautiful bedroom" which was only used on special occasions, and, above it, a small room: the "grandfather's room," accessed via a trapdoor by climbing onto the stove. Everything else was the empty barn and stable. 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 for a farmhouse to renovate, and they must have passed by this ruin ten times: cracked walls, a roof ready to collapse, a rotten frame... What prompted them, on that summer day in 1979, to take a look inside? And there, in what remained of the kitchen, supporting a blackened hearth where a small wood-burning stove sat, pathetically, they stopped dead in their tracks before the column: a marvel of a corner column in cut stone, sculpted, intact, as beautiful as the day it was built, supporting a fireplace with a straight lintel. They bought the column... along with the ruin around it. But not before having to dissuade a developer who planned to convert it into holiday apartments. Purchase price: 50,000 francs. As a result, the Heimatschutz (French Heritage Society) stepped in and immediately listed the facade as a historical monument. For the rest... then began for the valiant owners an adventure akin to the one recounted by Katharina von Arx in *Ma Folie Romainmôtier*.

Henri Schneider, a watchmaking engineer trained at the ETS (École Techniques Industrielles), and his wife Paule – “no formal training, but plenty of passion” – worked with local artisans, rediscovering techniques, relearning traditional skills, and transforming themselves, weekend after weekend, into laborers, masons, carpenters, draftsmen, and historians. Their first objective: the structural work. Jean-Louis Geiser, a carpenter from La Ferrière, built the new framework, calculated according to modern standards but using the techniques of the old construction: six columns, rafters made from fir trunks hewn on two sides, beams and uprights fitted and secured with wooden pegs. The 305 square meters of roof will be covered, as originally intended, with 66 cm long wooden shingles, cut from white fir that Henri Schneider went to select in the forest with Denis Sauser of La Chaux-du-Milieu, one of the last specialists in this craft (he received the Heimatschutz Prize in 1981).

The façade, which proudly displays the date 1652 on the front door, was in itself a book of architecture and history: the superb mullioned window of the beautiful bedroom, opened in 1673, had been bricked up at a time when taxes were based on the number of windows framed in stone! It will be restored. On the east side, the porch, the bread oven roof, and the construction of the grandfather's room on the first floor date from the 18th century. And from

Visit: Patrice Bayard
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