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

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 there are still a few 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 last century, with just enough electricity and water to be drawn from the cistern. The tiny habitable part consisted of the hearth (the kitchen), the "beautiful room" where one only entered on feast days, and above, a small room: the "grandfather's room", which was accessed by a hatch by climbing onto the stove. All the rest was the barn and the empty stable. The house was abandoned in the mid-seventies when, the mother having died, 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, sculpted, intact, beautiful as on the first day, supporting a fireplace 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. Then the Heimatschutz 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 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, carpenter from La Ferrière, built the new structure, calculated according to modern norms but using the techniques of old construction: 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 wood shingles, which Henri Schneider had chosen together with Denis Sauser, one of the last specialists in this art.
The facade, which proudly displays the date 1652 on the front gate, constitutes a book of architecture and history in itself: the beautiful window with mullions in the beautiful room, opened in 1673, had been walled up at a time when taxes were calculated according to the number of windows surrounded by stone. It was restored. On the east side, the porch, the roofing of the bread oven, and the construction of the grandfather's room on the first floor date back to the 18th century.