Farm for sale - 2615 Sonvilier

IN 1985, THIS RESTORED OLD FARM RECEIVED THE NEUCHÂTEL HOMELAND PROTECTION AWARD.

THE PAST TO THE PRESENT

When architecture combines with contemporary past, or how to bridge three and a half centuries of history.
Between the original "beautiful room" and the modern living area installed in the old stable, there is just a simple wooden door. And a leap of three hundred and fifty years. But not the slightest shock: just life continuing, in the gentle undulations of this northern end of Val-de-Ruz.

It is a Jura farm, like a few others still remaining in the region. Built in 1652, it had belonged, throughout the last century, to the same family of modest peasants, the Scheideggers. Upon the father's death in the sixties, the mother and daughter continued to live there as in the last century, with just the electricity and water that had to be drawn from the cistern. The tiny living area consisted of the hearth (the kitchen), the "beautiful room" which was only entered on festive days, and, above, a small room: the "grandfather's room", which was accessed by a trapdoor by climbing on the stove. Everything else was the barn and the stable, empty. The house was abandoned in the mid-seventies when, after the mother passed away, the daughter had to be placed in a home.

For ten years, Henri and Paule Schneider had been scouring the region in search of a farm to renovate, they must have passed by this ruin ten times: cracked walls, a roof ready to collapse, rotten beams... What drives them, on that summer day in 1979, to take a look inside? And there, in what remains of the kitchen, supporting a blackened hearth where a small wood stove sits, they stop in their tracks before the column: a marvel of a corner column made of dressed stone, sculpted, intact, beautiful as on the first day, supporting a fireplace with a straight lintel. They buy the column... with the ruin around it. Not without having to, beforehand, disinterest a developer who planned to install holiday apartments there. Purchase price: 50,000 francs. Consequently, the Heimatschutz enters the scene and immediately classifies the facade. For the rest... begins then for the valiant owners an adventure akin to that recounted by Katharina von Arx in My Folly Romainmôtier.

Henri Schneider, an engineering graduate in watchmaking, and his wife Paule - "no training but passions" - will work with artisans from the region, rediscovering techniques, relearning traditional gestures, transforming themselves, weekend after weekend, into laborers, masons, carpenters, draftsmen, historians. First objective: the structural work. Jean-Louis Geiser, a carpenter in La Ferrière, realizes the new framework, calculated according to modern standards but using the techniques of old construction: six columns, rafters made from fir trunks cut on two sides, beams and posts adjusted and fixed with wooden dowels. The 305 m² of roofing will be covered, as originally, with wooden shingles 66 cm long, cut from white fir that Henri Schneider went to choose in the forest accompanied by Denis Sauser, from La Chaux-du-Milieu, one of the last specialists in this art (he received the Heimatschutz Prize in 1981).
The facade, which proudly displays the date of 1652 on the front portal, constituted a book of architecture and history in itself: the superb mullioned window of the beautiful room, opened in 1673, had been blocked at a time when the tax amount was fixed according to the number of windows surrounded by stone! It will be restored. On the east side, the awning, the covering of the bread oven, and the construction of the grandfather's room, on the first floor, date from the 18th century. And from

This restored farm was awarded the...