"Magnificent renovated farm. Entered into the history of watchmaking"

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 centuries and a half of history.
Between the "beautiful room" and the modern living room installed in the old barn, there is only a simple wooden door. And a leap of three centuries and a half. But no shock: just life continuing, in the gentle hills of this northern corner of Val-de-Ruz.

It is a Jurassic farm, like there are still some 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 here, 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 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 stable, empty. 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: cracked walls, the roof ready to collapse, the beams rotten... What prompted them, on this summer day in 1979, to take a look inside? And there, in what was left of the kitchen, a column supported a blackened fireplace, where a small wood stove sat, and they stopped in front of the column: a masterpiece of a stone corner 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. Not without having to buy out an investor who wanted to install vacation apartments here. 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 ETS engineer in the watchmaking industry, and his wife Paule - "no training but passions" - worked with craftsmen from the region, rediscovering old techniques, relearning traditional gestures, transforming themselves, from weekend to weekend, into craftsmen, masons, carpenters, draftsmen, historians. First objective: the rough construction. Jean-Louis Geiser, a carpenter from La Ferrière, built the new roof 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 wooden shingles 66 cm long, cut from white fir wood, which 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).