The most profound thing Bard Yersin did to this 18th-century Fribourg farmhouse was strip away layers from an earlier renovation. La Crêta is an adaptive reuse project that proves sustainable design's most powerful tool is restraint.
Seeing an old building for all of its beauty takes a certain eye. And a particular courage to decide that the most radical act is removal rather than addition. For Swiss practice Bard Yersin, the transformation of a rural apartment within an 18th-century Fribourg farmhouse starts with subtraction. The architects have peeled back decades of well-intentioned interventions to reveal what was always there.
The farmhouse at La Crêta belongs to a regional typology that once suited a different way of life: dwelling and agricultural function unified under a single roof, each dependent on the other. In these Fribourg farmhouses, the rural half followed a standard spatial logic – two stables flanked a central passageway known as the fourragère, a generous through-space used for feeding livestock. The extra ceiling height wasn’t incidental. It was structured around agrarian needs, allowing hay to be stored directly above with the animals below. The building was, in its original form, a kind of diagram of rural life.
The apartment as it existed when Bard Yersin received the brief told a different story, a 2011 renovation had systematically erased its original spatial flow. A concrete slab had replaced the original ceiling joists, and masonry walls stood where wooden structure once was. The fourragère, once the heart of the rural section, had been partitioned and compressed into something unrecognisable, but the bones of the building were still there, buried below.
Rather than layering new material onto an already overworked substrate, the project operates as a re-transformation. The primary move is the restoration of the fourragère‘s central through-configuration: partitions have been removed, and crucially, the concrete slab was cut through its full depth. This single act of cutting restores the verticality to the central living space, returning the sectional drama that defined the original passageway. Standing in the living room now, the full height of the space reasserts itself – a double-volume echoing its original proportions, with strong glulam beams supporting the roof framework.
The resulting plan follows what the architects say is the farmhouse’s own “tripartite logic” – the main living space occupies the former fourragère, while bedrooms and service rooms settle into the structural bays on either side.
Material choices follow the same level of discipline. Where pseudo-Tuscan finishes once attempted to domesticate the rural volume into something more conventionally residential, white tiles now line the wet rooms, a reference to the milking rooms that originally occupied this part of the building. Elsewhere, plaster has been stripped rather than renewed, returning the walls to their original texture. Original, aged materials – brick, concrete and timbers – have be exposed.
The detailing throughout captures craftsmanship. A terrazzo ledge runs horizontally through the main volume – a datum that separates the brick masonry below from the light timber construction above, marking the threshold between the building’s found material and its new insertion with confident precision. The plywood-lined wooden structure that rises within the existing envelope is careful not to compete with what surrounds it: a modern, pale element against the rougher textures of the original fabric.
What Bard Yersin has undertaken at La Crêta Farmhouse is a model for working with existing buildings to truly express their charm and character. The most ecological building, after all, is the one already standing.
But adaptive reuse done well demands something more sophisticated than simply keeping walls in place – it requires a genuine reading of what a building was, and what unnecessary accumulation has prevented it from being functional in the 21st century.
At La Crêta, the real design execution is in the clarity and restraint of what has been taken away.
