The House/Barn

The "barn" end

I promised a tour of the “big house” at Georg’s farm, and here it is. 

The "house" end

No one knows the exact year that they started building this magnificent place, but it was sometime in the 1700s. As each farming couple reached retirement age, they would move to a different house on the farm, and leave this big one to the working couple (which was Georg and Maria's parents by the late 1940s). There were also anywhere from 5 to 15 hired hands, living in various buildings on the farm. 

Inside the house, the rooms are arranged like this, more or less (mostly less — I never did quite figure out how the rooms fit together). There are no hallways between rooms except in the middle part of the living area, where there is a stairway going upstairs, and a hall back to the barn door. You can also access the barn by a door from the upstairs (which leads to the barn attic). 

In the original house, the cooking area actually was in the barn, right with the animals, to conserve warmth for every being involved. But in more recent times, the kitchen has been inside the “people” half of the building. 

Here is Maria, showing Gary into the front door, which has a holly shrub next to it (the holly shrubs here always make me feel I'm in a special place, which is true). 

When you walk in this door, you are standing in this room:

And then you walk into this room:

And then this one:

And this, which leads to the porch.

And then you are on the porch:

And then you go back through a somewhat modern kitchen (which I didn't get a photo of) to one of my favorite rooms, the bauernzimmer (farmer's room), where Maria said the family used to spend most of its time together:

On a table in this room is a collection of Delft tiles, one of my favorite things:

Georg and Maria’s mother is the one responsible for decorating the rooms, and they’ve been left as she had them when she passed away a few years ago. She was an artist, and there must be hundreds of her paintings throughout the house, as well as other art and collections. 

I hope the photos are showing how completely delightful this house is: each room has its own color scheme, and the collections of things she chose to decorate the tables and windowsills are funky and fun. The views out each window into this garden or that one are so beautiful, even in winter, I can't even imagine how wonderful it must be in summer (one window, Maria said, has a magnolia tree outside it). The whole place feels like a magical rabbit warren. If it were mine, the Scandinavian in me might long to wipe a tabletop clean, but that would be very wrong. 

One last photo for this post -- the green bath, complete with chandelier: 

Next post: the upstairs and the barn!