8.5 room House in Sonvilier

IN 1985, THIS RESTORED OLD FARM HAD RECEIVED THE NEUCHÂTEL HEIMATSCHUTZ PRIZE.THE PAST TO THE PRESENTWhen architecture is combined with the past, or how to bridge three and a half centuries of history.Between the "beautiful room" original and the modern living room installed in the old barn, there is only a simple wooden door. And a leap of three hundred and fifty years. But no shock: just life continuing, in the gentle hills of this northern end of the Val-de-Ruz.It is a Jurassic farm, like some still existing in the region. Built in 1652, it had belonged, throughout the last century, to the same family of modest peasants, the Scheideggers. When the father died in the sixties, the mother and daughter continued to live there, as in the previous century, with just electricity and water to be drawn from the cistern. The tiny habitable part consisted of the hearth (kitchen), the "beautiful room" where one only entered on holidays, and above, a small room: the "grandfather's room", which was accessed by a hatch by climbing onto the stove. Everything else was the barn and the empty stable. The house was abandoned in the mid-seventies when the mother died and the daughter had to be placed in a home.For ten years, Henri and Paule Schneider had been searching the region for a farm to renovate. They must have passed by this ruin ten times: damaged walls, a roof ready to collapse, a rotten structure... What prompted them, on this 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 stove sat, they stopped in front of the column: a masterpiece of a corner column in stone, carved, intact, beautiful as on the first day, supporting a chimney with a straight lintel. They bought the column... with the ruin around it. Not without having to convince an investor who wanted to install vacation apartments there. Purchase price: 50,000 francs. The Heimatschutz then stepped in and immediately classified the facade. For the rest... began for the brave owners an adventure similar to the one told by Katharina von Arx in Ma Folie Romainmôtier.Henri Schneider, ETS engineer in the watchmaking industry, and his wife Paule - "no training but passions" - worked with craftsmen from the region, rediscovering traditional techniques, relearning traditional gestures, transforming themselves, from weekend to weekend, into laborers, masons, carpenters, draftsmen, historians. First objective: the rough construction. Jean-Louis Geiser, carpenter from La Ferrière, built the new structure, calculated according to modern norms but using the techniques of the old building: six columns, roof beams cut from fir tree trunks, beams and posts adjusted and fixed with wooden pegs. The 305 m² of roofing were covered, as originally, with 66 cm long wooden shingles, cut from white fir, which Henri Schneider had chosen in the forest, accompanied by Denis Sauser from La Chaux-du-Milieu, one of the last specialists of this art (he received the Heimatschutz prize in 1981).