Barn Living: Old Becomes New Again

High ceilings, tall walls, exposed timbers, simplicity. East Enders have long had a love affair with barns in the Hamptons, so it is only logical that the next step is to live in them.

“I think people have a longing for the past, for simpler times, especially in difficult times,” Manhattan-based architect Alex Gorlin, who designs modern barns for Plum Builders in East Hampton, said during a telephone interview last month. “The barn is not just a reality but a symbol, in terms of living close to the land and leading a healthy lifestyle. Even though you’re not necessarily growing vegetables, you get the feeling you could be.”

He laughed. “It’s like you’re a horse in your own barn, or a cow,” he said. “It straddles the simple-but-luxury lifestyle in the Hamptons.”

The entrance—a 4-foot-6-inch-tall-by-9-foot-wide solid wood door—presents the scale of what’s to come, Plum Builder founder Al Giaquinto said during a recent telephone interview of the design he builds.

“Barns are over-scale,” he explained. “Barns were built to store animals and then, up above, materials—feed, hay, things like that. What you had were these very tall walls, so we include tall walls in our barns.”

The 16- to 20-foot-high walls enclose the heart of the modern barn: one large, open, loft-like space that typically includes the kitchen, living and dining areas, Mr. Gorlin said, not to mention a lot of glass, exposed wooden beams and natural materials. Gone are the walls of the last 350 years, Mr. Giaquinto said.

“One of the big trends is bringing the outside in and the inside out,” the builder said. “Stone, a lot of windows, people really gravitate toward that. It’s an organic feeling of where we are today. People want to be more connected to nature and the earth. We have so much technology in our lives. When people come back to the East End, they get back into nature very quickly.”

But the latest in media rooms and home automation systems, such as Savant, an Apple-based program that controls the entire barn with the touch of an iPhone or iPad, don’t hurt, either. Neither do the Italianate

kitchens, furnished with an, on average, 16-foot-long island, Bertazzoni range and German-engineered Liebherr refrigerator, which Mr. Giaquinto likened to “the Mercedes” of its industry.

Plum Builders is on its third six-bedroom, six-bathroom modern barn in East Hampton, Mr. Giaquinto said. The first two, just outside the village, sold for $3 million and $3.5 million. By midsummer, there will be four more under construction, he said, and those will be listed for just under $4 million, and with the lower level close to 6,500 square feet.

“We sold the first two before they were finished and now our real estate broker has three people hovering in the wings who want to see the plans for the new ones,” he said. “We feel that it’s a niche that’s overlooked. It’s a market that has not been served. We have very little competition.”

But that may not be the case for long. Yankee Barn Homes creative director Jeffrey Rosen has moved into the area, and he, too, is on his third barn. The first sold in three weeks for $3.4 million and the second is on the market for $3.95 million, he said.

“They’re very unique spaces because they have great interior volume, which is unexpected for village houses,” he explained during a telephone interview last month, noting that the barns he builds are between 3,000 and 4,500 square feet above ground, not including the lower level. “They have regional appeal because the Hamptons area was originally farmland. There are so many cookie-cutter mini-mansions out there. People are looking for something different.”

Approximately three years ago, Mr. Rosen, who works as an interior designer in Manhattan, discovered Yankee Barn Homes, a New Hampshire-based company that manufactures insulated, timber-frame homes in shell packages, which are delivered to and raised on the building site in as little as two weeks.

“You get the sense of a traditional barn and how a traditional barn is put together,” Mr. Rosen said. “The windows and doors are installed into the panels. The house comes down in any number of truckloads and it’s put together like a puzzle. You can see as much or as little timber in the structure as you want to. The appeal these days is seeing a lot of the structure. They like the handmade look, which provides an intimate feeling, in contrast to how busy life is these days.”

The Yankee Barn Homes barns can also be controlled remotely and feature a similar open layout, which are more popular now than ever, Mr. Rosen said, and made relevant for 2012.

“It’s not the open plan of the ’80s, where you were overwhelmed by huge rooms,” he said. “Basically, the rooms are open to each other but still read as individual rooms. They’re livable by providing all the comforts that people want these days, which is a lot of glass, natural materials like wide-plank, southern pine floors and stone. So it’s really manipulating the space through texture, light and scale.”

On the interior, Mr. Rosen said he usually sticks with a casual, neutral color palette that allows the eventual buyer to bring in their own tastes.

Mr. Giaquinto said he typically introduces an ocean blue into certain spaces, such as the backsplash of the kitchen, or warm grays to complement the stonework throughout the house.

“The East End was an agrarian society when it was formed, so there were always barns here,” Mr. Giaquinto said. “We’ve given these modern barns a timeless look, so it’s something that won’t go out of style in 10 or 15 years. It will stand the test of time.”