In December 1970, Rear Admiral H. Nelson Lay and his wife Beth bought a deteriorating farmhouse near Perth for $16,000. Promptly, all three of the barns on the property collapsed due to heavy snow. The purchase marked Lay’s retirement after a long career, including significant service during WWII, where he commanded the Restigouche at Dunkirk and the Nabob in the North Atlantic. He was awarded an OBE for his service.
Throughout his lifelong military career, Lay kept himself constantly busy with handcrafts and other hobbies. During the war, he would often while away the time on ship by hooking rugs or building hardwood furniture. So at the farmhouse, Lay wanted a unique design. By chance his son introduced him to the British architect John Honer, who was doing a stage at the office of John Parkin, working on the Department of National Defense building in Ottawa. Honer agreed to design the farmhouse on nights and weekends. A few years later when he moved back to England, Honer was the executive architect of the Barbican, a sprawling brutalist complex which transformed a bombed out London neighbourhood.
In many ways the design he did for the Lays is a blend of practicality and experimentation, essentially a testing ground for some of the ideas that he later implemented at the Barbican and other buildings in London. He simplified the layout of the farmhouse, but also reimagined the addition with a strikingly modern massing. Honer’s use of large eight foot window units, flat roofs, deep recesses and vertical wooden siding on the exterior reflected the brutalist style seen in his later work at the Barbican.
Later, in the 1990s a renovation altered the building but mostly in cosmetic ways: they replaced the wood windows with fiberglass and covered the original modern features with more traditional elements like a peaked roof and board and baton siding. When LAMAS assessed the house in 2022, we started to see the lineage of the design under the changes that had been made in the 90s. Interpreting a series of Honer’s original drawings that the clients had in storage, we embraced the modern aesthetics of the addition and started to match them with the photos we had seen of the Barbican apartments. For example, the open tread solid oak stair in the farmhouse was identical to the one found in the Barbican’s duplex units.
We replaced the windows with wood units similar to the originals and accentuated a colour scheme on the interior that was inspired by contemporary interiors at the Barbican. On the exterior we chose a vertical raw wood siding that would grey over time, eventually looking much like concrete “board form” of the brutalist style. Our renovation aims to highlight the design’s historical significance while also integrating modern elements like solar panels, and a ground source heat pump. The final design reflected a mix of farmhouse charm and brutalist inspiration, with details drawn from Honer’s work at the Barbican and a careful restoration of the farmhouse’s unique character.
