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 corner of the Val-de-Ruz.

It is a Jurassic farm, like some still existing in the region. Built in 1652, it belonged to the same family of modest peasants, the Scheideggers, throughout the last century. When the father died in the sixties, the mother and daughter continued to live there as if they were in the previous 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" which was only entered on holidays, and above, a small room: the "grandfather's room", which was accessed by a hatch on 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: cracked walls, the roof ready to collapse, the beams rotten... What prompted them to take a look inside on that summer day in 1979? And there, in what was left of the kitchen, a column supported a blackened fireplace, on which a small wood stove sat, 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. After they had to buy out 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... the brave owners began 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 the techniques, relearning the 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 roof structure, calculated according to modern norms but using the old building techniques: 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 roofing were covered, as originally, with 66 cm long wooden shingles made 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).