On a rise at the edge of Berau in Germany, with the Southern Black Forest opening out below, Klaus Keller Andy Keller Kathrin Keller Architekten gut a historic barn and split it vertically into two houses around a planted atrium.
The barn stood on a prominent shoulder of land at the edge of the village, its long roof falling in one uninterrupted slope toward the valley. Rather than demolish it, the studio kept the silhouette and hollowed everything behind it. What survives from the agricultural building is its outline and a handful of structural bones. What is new is a pair of independent single-family homes, stacked side by side inside the old volume, divided along a vertical seam that runs the full height of the roof.
Outside, the vertical timber cladding has been left to silver in the weather, so the two houses read as one continuous barn from the road. The asymmetric pitch, the small punched openings high in the gable, the single long window set low toward the meadow: these are the moves of a working farm building translated into a contemporary Second Life. A rear-ventilated timber facade carries the language of the region's barns without copying their ornament.
Inside, the deep barn plan that would normally trap darkness has been opened up instead. Voids cut through several floors, so the sheer scale of the former hayloft stays legible from within, and daylight reaches the core. The ground floor of each house runs as one flowing level, entrance into kitchen into living room, poured white floors carrying the eye from room to room without a threshold to stop it.
Between kitchen and living area sits an atrium, a glazed courtyard with a single clipped tree rooted in a planter on a timber deck. The studio calls it the lungs of the house. It draws light and air into the middle of the plan and turns the seasons into something you live alongside: snow settling on the deck in winter, the smell of evening grass in summer, an interior garden that never leaves.
The clearest gesture is the retained structure. Raw concrete braces, cast decades ago, lean at their working angles through the white rooms, and where they meet the ridge the original timber beam is left exposed, split and grey with age. Against poured floors and Eames wire chairs at a black dining table, these salvaged members do the arguing. The upper two storeys break the openness back down into the smaller rooms of a Black Forest farmhouse, two children's rooms, two baths, an office and a bedroom per house, timber ceiling joists overhead where the ground floor kept its white restraint.
