'Barnstorming' in Bucks: Building barns for upscale living

When people ask, "Do you live in a barn?" they tend not to mean it as a compliment.

But those people probably haven't seen the work of Bucks County TimberCraft, the company that specializes in turning old Pennsylvania barns into high-end homes, made with antique barn wood but loaded with modern amenities.

Sean Tracy, 49, owner of the company and star of Barn Hunters, a reality show that debuted last fall on Great American Country, not only restores and upgrades old barns for local clients, but also dismantles aging structures - either because the property owners no longer want them, or because developers have other plans for the site - and resurrects them in new locations.

Although Tracy launched this business in 1999, he has benefited from growing interest in adaptive reuse in recent years.

"People want to be reminded of simpler times, and one really great way to do it is to put yourself in a building that's been around for a few hundred years," Tracy said. "To live in them warms people's hearts."

Tracy got started in barn conversions working for a family friend while he was in high school.

"I loved doing it, connecting to this history in the area," he said.

It's not a high-volume business, though. Over the last 15 years, he's renovated or converted 40 or 50 barns, he said. On average, projects take about a year.

At any given time, the company also has six to 10 barns in "inventory" - either dismantled in storage, or still standing in their original location. Often, Tracy acts as matchmaker, bringing together a barn structure and a property on which the barn can be situated.

"The object," he said, "is to make it feel like it's been there for 200 years. One of the biggest rewards for me is for a barn we relocated across Pennsylvania, for people to think it's always been there."

When Tracy met Anthony and Marlene Giordano of New Hope, they were planning to sell the 65-acre farm they owned in Lebanon, N.J. They had owned the property for 30 years, but hadn't used it much except to keep horses and farm a few alfalfa fields. Tracy asked whether he could come out to the property.

"He said you're crazy to sell," Anthony Giordano recalled. "He set up his stepladder in the middle of the field and he said, 'Climb up,' and showed me the view. And he said, 'I promise you'll have a whole different feel to this farm.' He was right."

So the Giordanos agreed to take down the three-bedroom house on the property and put up a barn, instead - if a 15,000-square-foot house with an indoor pool, a chef's kitchen, a cigar room, six bedrooms, and a stone pizza oven can be called a barn.

"He mixes the contemporary with the old farm look so there's a little bit of everything," said Giordano, who uses the barn, which was originally in Berks County, as a weekend retreat for himself, and his children and grandchildren. "You have a 200-year-old room with a fireplace and you look up and see the round stainless-steel ducts with heating and air-conditioning."

In addition to state-of-the-art amenities, Tracy added lots of salvaged flourishes: built-in bunk beds made of barn wood in one bedroom; a 20-foot dining table of reclaimed planks; a stair railing made of old steel farming implements; and an elevator inside a silo. The Giordanos' grandchildren also have a playroom modeled after a horse stall, complete with a sliding door.

"They were joking that, to make my house, they emptied all the antique barn wood out of Bucks County," Giordano said. The project took almost three years.

It's not a cheap process: Tracy is often, essentially, building a new house from the ground up, albeit with reclaimed materials. Projects can cost between $500,000 and $3 million.

Nor is it simple: There are often surprise structural problems, and there are design challenges, because preserving the soaring ceilings and open rooms that make barn homes desirable can make it difficult to fit in the amenities that owners want.

"These structures are old, and all these timbers were hacked out of the forest by hand, so nothing's straight or plumb or true," he said. "The people that we have working on it have to be familiar with the different techniques used both back in the day when they built the structures, as well as modern techniques and technology to make these things come back to life and give them another 200 years."

Tracy has developed solutions for concealing utilities: for example, hiding them within hollow beams, or running them through rusty-looking antique pipes.

Other times, though, the only solution is the most difficult one - such as at the Quakertown property of Seth and Stephanie Weber, where Tracy's team had to excavate the basement to clear space for plumbing, utilities, and a laundry room.

There, the goal was to turn a crumbling 1841 stone bank barn, which was held together by mud, animal hair, and little else, into a guesthouse and entertaining space (the Webers live in a stone farmhouse elsewhere on the property).

In the course of a year, Tracy took apart the barn, fixed it up, and put it back together, adding a new roof and two upstairs bedrooms, as well as a fireplace and kitchen. He also added fanciful extras, including sliding barn doors that roll back to reveal the front entrance.

Tracy's work on barns has taken him in many directions, including using reclaimed wood to help age whiskey and rum for a craft distillery he started on the side. When Robert Horowitz, president of New Hope-based Juma Entertainment, heard about Bucks County TimberCraft - he'd been looking for a barn conversion pro for a potential TV show - Tracy added television personality to his resume. The production company is currently in talks with the network about a second season, he said.

Fixing up barns isn't easy, Tracy said, but lately the hard part has become finding them in the first place. He's had to go farther afield in search of aging structures.

"It is a dwindling supply," he said. "Especially here in Bucks County, a lot of the barns have been restored, converted, or taken down. There's not too many left."

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@samanthamelamed