Starting a New Life in an Old Barn

“My brother and I were taught when we were young that you should always have a dream,” says Barbara Johnsen, a native San Franciscan now living in Sonoma. “Our parents told us anything is possible.”
While her brother went out and built the large schooner he lives on in British Columbia, Johnsen wound up setting her sights on a barn that she could convert into a residence.

Johnsen was raised in Los Altos, always around horses. “Barns were very comforting places. I always hung out there and never wanted to leave,” she recalls. “There is something so simple, so pure, so honest about barns.”
Her late father, Edwin Johnsen, was a builder and developer who passed on his genetic propensity for construction to his daughter.

“Because of my family’s business, I got a hands-on education about architecture and building traditions,” Johnsen says.

After graduating from UC-Davis and studying design in San Francisco, she launched a successful career in a related field.
“I spent 30 years in San Francisco renovating everything from houses and commercial buildings to big yachts,” Johnsen says. “Then I hit the wall.

“I lost my passion for doing the work for other people. But I still have passion for the work. I believe that the quality of our lives is very much impacted by the quality of the space we live in. Everyone has an environment that they are more comfortable in.”
Johnsen got bit by the barn bug about 10 years ago, after she learned that old barns were being torn down back east. A self-described “recovering interior designer,” she started collecting books and articles on the subject. Further research led her to Elric J. Endersby and Alexander T. Greenwood, who had founded the New Jersey Barn Company in 1976 to save many of the state’s old barns and houses before they were beyond salvaging or at risk of being destroyed by a zealous developer.

After they select a barn, they document and disassemble it, then store it in the company’s Princeton warehouse or re-erect it on another site for a client. So far, New Jersey Barn Company has restored some 135 buildings, including one barn that was transformed into a summer home on Long Island for film director Steven Spielberg.

Once Johnsen found the right barn – built in 1840 on a family farm in Neshanic Station in central New Jersey — she began scouting for an appropriate site. Having owned property in Sonoma and Marin, she searched in both counties before discovering a property in Schellville. Unfortunately, it was occupied by a junkyard whose owner was in no hurry to clean up and clear out.
However, after years of looking at homes and boats and visualizing what could be, Johnsen said, “I could see past all the clutter to the bones of the land. I knew it was the perfect place for an old beautifully restored barn.
“I made an offer but it took a year in escrow to deal with the seller’s issues. Even after escrow closed, it took (him) six months to get his stuff out of here,” she adds.

Johnsen had spent part of her childhood aboard an old, heavy-timbered lumber schooner that her father kept in San Francisco Bay, and says she has always been “fascinated by how things go together.”
For the past two weeks, she’s had a chance to observe first-hand how barns were put together a century and a half ago. Endersby, Greenwood and their small crew arrived in Sonoma earlier this month to erect Johnson’s barn on three acres off Eighth Street East.
By the time the white oak frame was put up last week, it was possible to visualize the barn’s origins as a wagon house, corn crib and granary.

Johnsen plans to restore the building with “green” renewable materials and install energy-efficient systems, create large lofty spaces and add a 28-foot-tall metal silo that will house a circular stairway to the hayloft that will become the master bedroom. She won’t add much landscaping because she thinks the barn should be as true to its agrarian roots as possible. She hopes to move into her dream home by March.

“I want it to be warm and welcoming yet have an edgy urban feel in some areas,” she explains. “This project is about renewal on several levels. It’s a renewal of the land and both a professional and personal renewal for me.”