Saltbox Farm — Haver & Skolnick Architects

Balancing historic heritage and modern lifestyles is one of the greater challenges architects face when adapting old houses for new inhabitants.

Invariably, the original home isn’t large enough, and its spaces–dark, tiny and low-ceilinged–are not appropriate or desirable for a modern lifestyle.

A small home that was built in the rolling hills of Fairfield County, Connecticut, a half dozen years before America was born gave Haver & Skolnick Architects the opportunity to create an expansive two-wing addition that allows the original structure literally to stand front and center.

“We considered ourselves stewards of the house, and we wanted to respect it,” says Stewart R. Skolnick, AIA, who along with Charles M. Haver, AIA, founded the Connecticut-based firm.

But that wasn’t easily accomplished because the house, which is on a working farm covering 150 acres, had been altered and expanded so many times that it was a mismatched mix of Greek Revival, Victorian, Colonial Revival and 1970s embellishments and appeared to have no significant style of its own to turn the pages of time back to.

“It was only when we were crawling around and measuring it that we discovered that it was a simple center-chimney farmhouse with a distinctive saltbox profile,” says Skolnick.

The revelation led the Haver & Skolnick team to create a design that celebrates the original saltbox, which is only 2,000 square feet, and re-establishes its prominence by adding an expansive section that’s nearly quadruple its size.

Their solution was to conceive of the addition as a backdrop to the antique house, allowing the saltbox form to be completely visible on three sides with only a narrow connection to the new addition on the rear.

That key connection links the keeping room of the saltbox with the addition’s great room, which was established as the hub of family life.

This was accomplished by a series of smaller-scale interconnected volumes, suggesting the house evolved over time in a good way instead of the manner it did in real life. 

Bay windows, small shed dormers, a cupola that houses a shower, bracketed overhangs and covered porches also put the large addition in sync with the original house.

The Haver & Skolnick team tied the two buildings together by incorporating the original home’s simple, clean details and materials in the new structure.

Each foundation is made of fieldstone, and exterior walls are a mix of clapboards and shingles. The roofing is cedar shingles with standing-seam copper above the dormers.

Interior walls are unpainted rough plaster, and flooring is a mix of wide-board rustic oak and natural-cleft bluestone. Salvaged antique timbers are used throughout both structures.

A second chimney in the addition cleverly hides mechanicals, reinforcing the idea that the two sections are one.

To further honor the heritage of the original house, the rooflines of the addition are lower than those of the saltbox. Only the ridge of the carriage house is higher than the antique house, a common feature of 18th-century barns. 

The addition encompasses two wings: One accommodates the primary suite and two guest bedrooms; the other has a mudroom that leads to a three-story carriage house that has garages, a gym and service spaces on the main floor, an additional bedroom and office above and a rustic pub and entertainment spaces in the basement.

“We made the foundation walls 12 feet high because the clients wanted a media room and a golf simulator room with high ceilings,” Haver says, adding that one of the wings steps down the hill to keep roof lines lower than those of the saltbox house.

Although the exteriors of the great room and mud room are designed to appear as one-and-a-half stories, they have the cathedral ceilings the owners requested. Natural light streams in through expansive walls of glass on the rear of the addition while the windows in front are small like those of the original saltbox.

“The owners wanted a lot of light and views, which meant the addition had to be very different from the original house” yet in sync with its style, Haver says.

The original house, which now includes a study, a tavern room, a keeping room with a ceremonial dining table that’s used on holidays and two ensuite bedrooms for the couple’s college-age children, was restored.

“We carefully catalogued and removed its original elements so that the structure could be repaired, and we completely rebuilt the chimney using salvaged materials,” Haver says.

The architectural team replaced the home’s later Greek Revival and Victorian details with ones in the simple, understated styles typical of those used in rural homes of the Colonial period when the home was built and switched out the 20th-century windows for hand-crafted ones with glass panes.

The changes give the saltbox new life and the owners the lifestyle they desire. TB