COOK- A stunning remodel that has converted a near-century-old Sears kit-barn into a showplace residence with distinctive Middle Eastern accents is now nearing completion amidst the forest and old farms of Field Township.
The barn, abandoned during the Great Depression, came with the property when Russell and Delphine Beatty, bought the land for the price of back taxes. The Beattys, who owned the adjacent farm to the north, picked up the property primarily for haying.
But for Russell and Delphine’s daughter, Sharon Beatty, the old barn was the property’s most valuable feature. She fondly recalls many hours spent playing in its hayloft as a child. So, when her mother decided to bequeath her property to her children about 20 years ago, Beatty knew that she wanted the 80 acres with the barn. And that’s how the property eventually came into the possession of Beatty and her husband, David Stanton.
Beatty viewed the barn as more than a familiar memory, she saw it as her future as well, intending to restore the grand old structure as a place to eventually settle.
But first, life interceded. Beatty and Stanton met when they were both living and working in Yemen, an impoverished country on the south end of the Arabian Peninsula. About twice the size of Wyoming, the country of 28 million people borders Saudi Arabia and Oman. Beatty went to Yemen as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1977, and eventually worked in the field of international development. Stanton also traveled overseas with the Peace Corps, serving in Botswana before moving to Yemen in 1991 to teach in an international school, where the couple eventually met.
Bit by bit
The couple’s work schedule provided the opportunity to come to Cook during the summer, time they would spend working on the restoration.
“It started when we were much younger and more fit and able,” Stanton said. “It started out with a query – ‘Do you think this would make a nice house?’ And I said yes, and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. We were living in Yemen at the time, so we were only here about six weeks every summer.” They spent that time building, hiring contractors, while still doing a lot of the work themselves. “So, for years and years it was just six weeks a year that we could spend on this, which is why it’s taken so long. We were limited by my vacation schedule until I retired in 2019,” said Stanton.
The first order of business was to repair the roof, which was severely degraded, leaving the barn open to the elements, including birds, Beatty said.
“After that, the first thing we did was hire a barn straightener,” she said.
“By that time, it was 90 years, maybe 85 years, and the thing had started changing shape,” Stanton said. “Peter Maeder, a good friend of ours who did most of the initial skilled work, very frequently said, ‘There isn’t a right angle in this place.’ He was talking about the fact that it leaned, and it bowed out.”
Beatty and Stanton focused primarily on the hayloft at first, as they intended that to be their primary living space. At 48 feet by 28 feet with a vaulted ceiling 22 feet high, the loft was one big room that needed to be turned into smaller rooms and other living areas for a self-contained living space.
Beatty and Stanton accomplished that in part by using the vertical space to create a second level in the loft that has sleeping and living room areas, as well as a small office and a bathroom. And it’s here that one sees the influence of their years in Yemen on the design, beginning with the railings on the staircase and around the upper level.
“These balusters were forged in Yemen by a guy that we were advised to contact if we wanted any steel work done,” Stanton said.
But it’s the living room that Beatty called “the most Yemeni part of this house.”
“This is a Yemeni living room, it’s called a mafrag,” she said. “Every room in Yemen has these cushions on the floor. It’s your living room, it’s your room for guests, it’s your bedroom at night because the cushions are ideal for sleeping, it’s where you eat. Everything is done in this one room which can accommodate almost any kind of occasion, so we designed the room around that idea.”
And if one raises their eyes toward the peak of the ceiling at either end of the barn, one will see two colorful round glass windows of Yemeni origin.
“It’s not stained glass, they call it colored glass,” Beatty said. “They’re usually in the shape of a half-moon, but you can do any shape you want. We decided we wanted to bring some back with us, so we found a very, very good artisan. We actually have two more which we haven’t figured out where to put yet.”
Stanton said the designs were inspired by the hex signs of Pennsylvania Dutch country his mother pointed out to him on family road trips.
On the lower level of the loft, two striking features are a room length bookshelf incorporated into the structural beams of the roof and a beautiful white pine floor, with the boards milled to their specifications in Deer River. The floor is complemented by thin cedar panels on the ceiling, chosen to reduce the weight of the installation.
The kitchen provides an example of a problem that Beatty and Stanton have encountered several times during their restoration, finding contractors willing to work with the unique materials imported from Yemen.
“We brought the granite (for the countertops) from Yemen, so we had to guess what the final proportions would be for each of the rooms and it turned out we were off a little bit,” Beatty said. “We had to recut everything, and no one would do it for us because they were worried we wouldn’t like it because it wasn’t standard. So, we had to settle for David figuring out how to cut it. We ended up reimagining exactly how to make the kitchen.”
Windows were chosen mostly to fit the existing openings in the barn, including the hay doors. Decorative elements such as paintings are by Yemeni artists, and other items are reflective of the couple’s other travels, such as tiles surrounding the bathroom tub.
Beatty said that the barn was far more space than they needed to live in.
“It was a little bit embarrassing that we didn’t think about the fact that this is really a big structure,” she said. “But once we realized this was going to be an issue, we decided to design it so that this is a space all its own on the top floor. The bottom floor is a completely separate apartment. It can have a kitchen, two bathrooms, two bedrooms, living spaces and a dining room.”
The upstairs was essentially finished two years ago, although there are still a few tweaks to be done. Beatty and Stanton are focused now on completing the downstairs, which still has work to keep them occupied.
One wall downstairs is faced with soft wood-fired brick from Yemen in a style known as yaagur, Beatty said.
“What they do in Yemen is carve into it traditional patterns – you see a couple of different patterns here. It’s usually on the outside of homes. But living in Yemen for 28 years or so, I built a second floor onto the home we owned and I had them do a wall of the yaagur in the kitchen because I liked the way it looked.”
The bricks were assembled and carved in Yemen, then imported as three separate pieces.
“My role, apart from doing semi-skilled work, is figuring out how to make some of Sharon’s ideas work,” Stanton said. “We could not import a Yemeni mason to do the yaagur here, so I had the idea of building it in sections, and then trying to figure it out when we got here.”
Another challenge has been the herringbone stone tile floor, primarily because the tiles are over an inch thick, and with all of the cuts required for the pattern it was difficult to find a contractor willing to take the task on.
A bathroom downstairs is unique in that reflects the time Beatty and Stanton lived in Vietnam after leaving Yemen.
“We decided to make the walls of this old French colonial style tile, which amazingly we found at Menard’s, because we had lived in Vietnam for five years, and all the old buildings had this exact pattern,” Beatty said. “We fell in love with it, and we wanted something to remind us of Vietnam, since everything else reminds us of Yemen.”
All of the hard work downstairs is done, Beatty said.
“We just mostly have painting and staining and hanging doors,” she said. “We’re not quite sure what to do with this part yet, but we’ll finish it and figure it out.”
Stanton also showed off a small board that came not from overseas, but from the barn itself.
“As far as we know, this is coming up on its 100-year anniversary,” Stanton said, pointing to the date etched in the wood. “We think this is the date that he pounded the last nail, Oct. 26, 1928.”
Beatty was pleased that for the most part, the restoration has remained true to her original vision.
“With a few improvements or modifications, this is pretty like I had imagined it,” she said. “Our vision was to incorporate Yemeni architectural features and to keep it as much like the original barn as possible.”
Beatty and Stanton’s vision not only included restoration of the barn, but restoration of the land around it, bringing back the native plants and grasses that had been pushed out by invasive species. That multiyear project will be the subject of an article in next week’s edition of the Timberjay.