Heronwood Farm
赫伦伍德牧场
Heronwood Farm is where it all began. Located in Upperville, Virginia, part of the bucolic Middleburg region, the farm’s 400-plus acres were previously owned by entrepreneur and Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke, and my former partner, Robbie Smith, and I were retained in 1983 by its subsequent owner to create eight initial buildings. These included two major barns: broodmare and yearling; three small isolation barns; a service building with bunk house; a large storage building forhay and bedding; and a manager’s house.
Taking our cue and those first tenuous steps into the world of specialized barn design from Morgan Wheelock, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based landscape architect who’d been commissioned to design the site, we incorporated his theories of natural light and ventilation into the 20-stall, 9,400-square-foot broodmare barn and 16-stall, 7,900-square-foot yearling barn. Wheelock’s practices, which had improved the health and safety of horses in the U.S., Canada, and France, helped broodmares to cycle naturally and carry their foals to full term without the fire danger and added cost of continuous, overburdened artificial lighting, sometimes used as a stimulant. His passive barn systems also helped ensure that equines avoided acquiring and transmitting respiratory ailments to the entire barn, as they are known to do. Typically this is attributed to a direct result of conventional barn ventilation, which is horizontal and achieved by opening the front and back doors to catch the breeze. In this manner, each horse catches whatever may be airborne from the previous horse. Random, ubiquitous, and ill-placed fans, which are a common feature of many barns, only serve to exacerbate the process by circulating bacteria, pathogens, allergens, and disease. To alter these standards, Wheelock advocated siting barns perpendicular to the prevailing summer breeze, something that precluded sick barns.
At Heronwood we utilized low vents and vented skylights—in fact, this project marked our first use of a vented skylight in a barn—as well as heated (by the sun) roofs and eaves to encourage upward ventilation. These principles were largely based on 18th-century Dutch-Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli’s equation of vertical lift—created by the speed of airflow over an airplane wing. The result we were looking for in our design was also facilitated by the rise of hot air known as the chimney effect, where air is pulled in low and vented out high. By constitution horses give off a lot of body heat and humidity. Along with the heat of the sun on the roof and skylight, this creates a heat differential between the barn floor and roof ridge. As heat rises, the Bernoulli effect helps move it along as the prevailing breeze blows across the roof.
Arriving at Heronwood in those early days, we were struck by the prevalence of stone walls or fences that stretched as far as the eye could see—accidental monuments, in a manner of speaking, to the enterprising farmers and their descendants who had cultivated and maintained the land and livestock for generations. In colonial days, occupants would take the rocks from their fields and pile them up to create fence lines. Because the existing fence lines would not work with the new paddock arrangement, however, Wheelock dismantled the fences and we paid homage to the past by preserving the stones for use in the new buildings.
Desiring to emulate the characteristic Federalstyle architecture that defined the Middleburg countryside, we used that form as gabled end structures, dormers, and other features in our buildings. The big question at the time was how to take the shape and proportion that came from a residential design element and apply it to horse shelters, which may be 200 to 250 feet long, 35 to 40 feet high, and 35- plus feet wide. In other words, how do we take the Federal-style scale and context, apply it to a barn, and actually have it work both aesthetically and in a practical sense?
We achieved this, in part, by using the dismantled stone fences, along with locally sourced stone (from Virginia and West Virginia) to create a shape at the end of the broodmare barn that imitated the Federal form, shape, and proportion. This element became a recess to contain the barn’s pocket doors, emerging as a dominant form in the building that became highly functional as well. In addition the same shape was repeated in the dormer windows and other gabled roof forms.
Design-wise, we learned that psychology is integral to the layout of a broodmare barn. It needs to be approached from the center through a meeting place or reception room in which the prospective customer can relax and learn about a horse’s stock or bloodlines. In a 20- to 24-stall barn, that reception room is typically located near the center of the barn’s long axis to balance the stalls on each end for more efficient service by the grooms.
At Heronwood, well-appointed furnishings provided for the ease and comfort of visitors, as there’s no denying that value in the interior translates to value in the quality of the product being sold. Conversely, with the yearling barn, the animal himself is being sold as opposed to strictly the bloodlines, so there is less emphasis on a luxe interior as the horse tends to be observed outdoors. Here, Wheelock designed a well-landscaped and pristine show ring centered on the cross aisle of the yearling barn.
Clearly the most imposing and intriguing aspect of the broodmare barn’s interior, and perhaps its exterior, is the ridge skylight that runs nearly the entire length of the roof and barn. In our quest to saturate the building with natural light—something elemental to efficient cycling of the broodmare—we decided a series of skylights might do the job, but what is essentially a glass ceiling or continuous skylight would achieve the objective seamlessly. In a broodmare barn, and in thoroughbred breeding, ideal conditions—those that don’t just simulate but actually invite natural conditions indoors—facilitate the horse cycling and foal dropping as early in the season after January 1st as possible. Because a horse is classified as a yearling on the following January 1st, regardless of when he was born in the previous year, one that has been on the ground and living/training longer when designated as such tends to be a stronger horse. In this regard, a barn created to court nature provides optimal opportunities for efficient and expedient fertility earlier in the year.
Additionally, without skylights and their benefits, handlers are known to enter dark barns, turning on lights at 4 a.m., to simulate a sunrise. Lights may go unrecognized and remain on all day, building up heat, igniting nests and cobwebs, inflating operating costs, and surely increasing the risk of a major barn fire.
As thoroughbreds are delicate animals with sensitive respiratory systems, keeping them extremely healthy and less susceptible to infection was paramount to the barn’s ventilation. Accordingly, it was sited perpendicular to the prevailing summer breeze so as not to encourage airborne bacteria pathogens, and allergens to travel through. Next, employing the aforementioned chimney effect and fluid dynamics principles of Daniel Bernoulli, vertical lift, or an upward airflow, was attained by placing vents along the floor and utilizing vented skylights, heated by the sun (which also heats the roof and eaves), which cause the heat within the barn to rise and exit. Horses typically suffer more health issues due to heat intolerance than they do in colder weather—except in extreme conditions.
Using a definite 7:12 roof pitch as we did also discouraged heated air from radiating back down, the way it would with many prefabricated barns that employ a 3:12 pitch that in fact makes the barn hotter instead of cooler. With the 7:12 pitch, heat travels up toward the vented skylight, creating the desired airflow and cooling. At Heronwood we learned that on a hot August afternoon, ven without the wind outside, you could tand in the main aisle of the barn and feel your hair lift just from the natural movement f air created by chimney and Bernoulli effects orking together.
Storage is a serious consideration when esigning barns that address the health nd safety of horses. More fatal barn ccidents occur because of improper lacement of hay, grain, bedding, and the flammable elements, which are generally tored overhead, creating imminent fire hazards. Additionally, hay stored in this manner contributes to widespread allergens and other equine respiratory ailments as the horse consistently inhales particles from above. In this respect, and considering Heronwood Farm was a fairly large thoroughbred breeding operation with multiple staff, it was better to isolate and confine the hay and bedding to one centralized area than to break it up into smaller components and facilities. In this manner, load was reduced on farm roads for big feed trucks going in and out, and outsiders were kept to a service area located, in this case, adjacent to the road. Consequently, farm security was less of an issue with its additional operating costs.
At the owner’s request, barns were masonry block as he wanted them to be fire safe and durable. While we considered using brick in a nod to more popular regional building materials, and also looked at wood for its aesthetic, masonry block with stucco applied to the exterior created a clean look that satisfied everyone. What’s more, stucco is not alien to the area as it was used on many structures in previous eras. Stone was used for its richness in the base, on the ends in deference to Middleburg/Upperville’s Federal-style architecture, and in the cross aisle entrances. Again, it’s the psychology of rich materials that tie into the landscape that make for a strong statement.
Because the owner did not want Dutch doors on the exterior side of the stalls, preferring the cleaner look of the long side of the barn, we put in low wall vents with dampers to aid and control airflow. This achieved many of the same results as the Dutch door. We also used Hopper windows, which open inside instead of out, but placed them strategically where the lowest point was about 12 feet up to preclude injury if a horse reared up in the stall. Hopper windows served to route the incoming air up to facilitate ventilation.
In subsequent years, Heronwood Farm saw the construction of an enclosed, covered round pen, a renovation/addition to the owner’s office and also to his residence, additional staff housing, adaptive reuse of an old residence on an adjoining farm that the owner purchased for staff housing and a farm office, renovation of a private estate barn for private/recreational horses, and renovations to grandstands and designs for judges’ stands at the Upperville Horse Show grounds—site of the oldest horse show in the country and part of Heronwood.
The barns stand as a testament to our first application of design principles that promote the health and safety of horses.
