IN 1985, THIS RESTORED OLD FARM HAD RECEIVED THE NEUCHÂTEL PRIZE FOR HEIMATSCHUTZ.

THE PAST TO THE PRESENT

When architecture is combined with the past, or how to bridge three and a half centuries of history.
Between the original "beautiful room" 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 that still exist in the region. Built in 1652, it had belonged, throughout the last century, to a 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 only a little electricity and water that had to be drawn from the cistern. The tiny habitable part consisted of the hearth (the kitchen), the "beautiful room" which one only entered on feast days, and above, a small room: the "grandfather's room", which was accessed by a trapdoor by climbing onto the stove. Everything else was the barn and the empty stable. The house was abandoned in the mid-seventies 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 searching the region for a farm to renovate. They must have passed by this ruin ten times: cracked 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 was left of the kitchen, supporting a blackened fireplace where a small wood stove sat, they stopped in front of the column: a masterpiece of a corner stone column, carved, intact, beautiful as on the first day, supporting a chimney with a straight lintel. They bought the column... with the ruin around it. After they had to buy out a developer 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... the brave owners began an adventure similar to the one told by Katharina von Arx in Ma Folie Romainmôtier.

Henri Schneider, an engineer in the watchmaking industry, and his wife Paule - "no training but passions" - worked with local craftsmen, rediscovering techniques, relearning traditional gestures, transforming themselves, from weekend to weekend, into laborers, masons, carpenters, draftsmen, historians. First objective: the rough construction. Jean-Louis Geiser, a carpenter from La Ferrière, built the new structure, calculated according to modern norms but using the techniques of old construction: six columns, roof beams made from tan oak logs planed on two sides, beams and posts adjusted and fixed with wooden pegs. The 305 m² of roof area were covered, as originally, with 66 cm long wood shingles, cut from white fir trees that Henri Schneider had chosen in the forest with Denis Sauser from La Chaux-du-Milieu, one of the last specialists in this art (he received the Heimatschutz prize in 1981).