Caroline Beebe transformed her husband’s carpentry shop into a home for herself and her poodle mix, Kitty (right), whom she rescued while in Mexico. Lola, a Pekingese, is visiting. Beebe’s home is filled with artwork and antiques. The century-old high chair provided years of service when her daughters were little; today it holds an antique painting. Photo by Shannon Zahnle
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.
