Timeless timbers blend seamlessly with modern energy efficiency in this old Ontario barn turned home. Words & photos :: Kristin Schnelten.
Sometimes persistence—and a bit of patience—pays off.
From their previous hillside home, Martin Mansikka and his young family had a bird’s-eye view of a fallow field across the Beaver Valley: a century-old farm with rolling topography and dense stands of trees. They dreamed of building their next house there, overlooking the escarpment—but the owner wasn’t selling.
“I called once a year, every year, to ask,” says Mansikka. “Finally, on the fourth or fifth try, he said yes.”
A homebuilder and designer with his company Talo Green Build, Mansikka spent months meticulously planning a modern house for a broad knoll in the centre of the property. Poised and ready to pull permits, he received a surprise call: Would he be interested in the frame of a 19th-century barn?
“I drove to Kitchener to tour the barn, and within 15 minutes I knew,” he says. Scrapping the modern design, the couple quickly embraced what Mansikka calls “the original prefab”: a 150-year-old hand-hewn timber frame with a soaring 30-ft.-high peak and a 4,000-sq.-ft. footprint.
After securing an engineer’s stamp of approval, a team painstakingly disassembled the barn, labelling each beam with cattle tags and stacking them on a single trailer. The frame sat for a few months during site preparation, then the task of reassembling the puzzle—including the original pegs—took a crane and crew a single day.
Talo (the Finnish word for “house”) focuses on energy-efficient builds, and for his own home Mansikka sited the barn, with its long wall of floor-to-ceiling triple-glazed glass, facing southeast for maximum solar gain in the winter, with a covered porch on the southwest end for summertime shade. He chose air-source heat pumps and hydronic floor heating, adding photovoltaic (PV) panels that enable the house to generate the majority of its own energy. The battery-aided PV system produces, at times, more energy than it consumes, using net metering to feed (and sell) those extra watts back to the grid.
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Exterior walls are clad with new barn boards inside and out, sandwiching thick insulated panels; interior walls, standard-built with drywall, are painted a simple white and sparsely adorned, helping to disperse the ample light. A large section of square cubbies in the main room keeps things tidy but accessible, and the custom feel belies what’s become a signature inclusion for Talo builds: “They’re just stacked IKEA shelving, built into the recess of the wall,” Mansikka says.
The full bed masonry fireplace is finished with two layers of escarpment stone, Guelph and Algonquin, intermixed with rubble and distressed mortar, creating the appearance of a barn foundation weathered over time. At the opposite end of the airy space, a crisp modern kitchen leads to a large butler’s pantry with additional storage—keeping a busy family’s daily clutter out of sight.
The couple quickly embraced what Mansikka calls “the original prefab”: a 150-year-old hand-hewn timber frame with a soaring 30-ft.-high peak and a 4,000-sq.-ft. footprint.
A chief tenet of efficient home design in a cold climate is protecting the northern façade, and this barn home follows suit, with a long, windowless hallway spanning the length of the house on that colder wall. Natural light spills in from the glassed-in breezeway connecting home and garage, which is protected from winter winds by the mature maple forest just through the doors.
In those woods, Martin has set winding trails for the family, including a path that leads out of the property and along the escarpment, connecting to his parents’ farm just a few concessions over.
This efficient barn reconstruction wasn’t the first for Mansikka, and it won’t be his last. Another stack of labelled beams sits tucked away in storage, awaiting the next project. But that frame will be for clients—the Mansikkas are no longer yearning for another property. They’re content in their new space.
“It’s just such an incredible feeling to be surrounded by these old timbers,” says Mansikka. “Just to think that these trees began their lives as saplings almost 400 years ago is pretty amazing.”
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