BY NANCY HILLER, PHOTOGRAPHY BY SHANNON ZAHNLE
Many of us would give our eyeteeth for the chance to make our home in a converted building. We swoon at the spare lines of a loft carved out of a former factory or the fusion of openness and solidity in a timber-frame barn-turned-home. The architecture of buildings designed for work enriches our experience of space and time with shades of a different, though palpable, past: Living in such spaces has the sense of a playful adventure.
Of course, echoes of the past are often discernible in environments that have been homesteads from the start — never more so than when a place has been in one’s own family, or when a home bears the unmistakable impress of some previous occupant’s forceful beliefs with which one concurs.
In each of the following homes — a converted carpenter’s workshop, a family farm, and a gritty urban compound — new occupants have embraced the original owner’s vision and are giving those dreams new life.