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A BARN DANCE

A former Victorian-era pigsty is given a hands-on makeover – with astonishing results

An expat Kiwi helped turn a Cotswolds pigsty into an astonishing family home.

It was not a story of love at first sight when Elle Kemp and Martin Gane first viewed the Victorian pigsty that later became their family home. “It wasn’t a very handsome pig barn,” says Elle. “It had all sorts of constrictions and not very big rooms. But we loved the stone detailing and the handmade bricks; they had so much colour and nuance.” Most importantly, the pigsty was their ticket out of town, a rural building at a price that they could afford. “We built our way out of town, into the country.” The country, in this case, was the area of Stroud, Gloucestershire, in the beautiful Cotswolds hills. The pigsty was made of creamy Cotswolds stone and clay bricks and, unusually for such a utilitarian building, it had been designed, in the mid 19th century, by Gothic revival architect Benjamin Bucknall.

In an accidental twist on the project, Martin, a New Zealander, had been a pig farmer in Ashburton, and later in Northern Ireland on his OE in the late 1990s. Nowadays he is a garden designer and artisan builder; Elle, who is English, is an interior design consultant.

A few years back, Martin and Elle pooled their complementary skills to establish Ridge & Furrow, a business specialising in building conversions (and sometimes creating new premises) that are in perfect harmony with their environment. They use the same light touch that has been central to the pig barn renovation: their aim, always, is to create a place that looks and feels like it’s been there forever.

Elle was seven months pregnant with their oldest son Claude, now aged 9, when they signed up for the barn in 2012, and later Gilbert, 7, arrived. Their new home, which they named Longridge Barn, was a derelict shell; it had walls, a steep outer tiled roof and a plot of land. It lacked even the basics of a ceiling and floor, although there was a bonus in that the pigs had long gone, leaving nary a whiff behind.

The interior comprised six pig bays, connected by a corridor, with a storeroom at one end. The walls of the bays supported the roof and could not be moved so Martin and Elle worked with these constrictions and also with the requirements of the barn being a heritage-listed building.

Says Elle: “We talked to the listing authorities about what we could and couldn’t do. We are pro-listing, we support their work. We had to find a way to make it happen and that was part of the

pleasure of the project. We never questioned whether or not we could do it, we just did it.”

They placed the living room, a snug, office and kitchen at one end of the building, a bathroom in the middle and two bedrooms at the other end. The living room is in the old storeroom while everything else is in the former pig bays.

There are three new rooms in an upstairs addition; heritage constraints meant that these could not be living spaces so Martin and Elle installed two bathrooms, and an office and storage area. Each room is accessed by a separate winding staircase, as dictated by heritage requirements and the pitch of the roof. They later got consent for an extra bedroom.

Martin was the builder, learning on the job. He jokes that when it came to the interior timber framing, he bought a how-to book, some larch wood and a couple of chisels, and got stuck in. He says his earlier life as a farmer in New Zealand has proved invaluable. “Kiwi farmers look at something and say, ‘I reckon I could do that’.

“I took it one step at a time. The biggest challenge was getting the place to still feel like a barn. So everything had to be honest and in the open; all the bathroom pipes are exposed. Some

barn conversions pretty much have a conventional house box inside. We wanted to feel like we were living in a barn.”

Elle says they haven’t been too particular about their furnishing style. They wanted the barn to have the relaxed ambience of a cosy pub or a much-loved tweed jacket.

“People give us their old knackered stuff,” Elle says. “We do some skip diving; we use other people’s discards.” She mentions a nice mirror, given to them by a friend who couldn’t sell it at a car boot sale because it had a chip. “Martin hung it on a nail in the bathroom. The nail was already in the wall, from years earlier. It was in the right place and it is one of my favourite things. It just happened.”

With the pig barn finally turned into a mellow and beautiful home, Elle and Martin began to look for another property to put their stamp on. They recently bought a 14th century farmhouse in Herefordshire and the barn now has new owners.

But Elle says it will always have a place in their hearts. “We learned so much from it. It made us as much as we made it; we are part of each other.”

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2022-06-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-06-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

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