Yarner Barn

Yarner Barn is a barn, likely dating from the 17th century, that was converted into a house between 1931 and 1932 for the Dartington Hall estate. The conversion was undertaken by Rex Gardner and R Heming for P Elmhurst, brother of L K Elmhurst. The barn is built of rendered local limestone rubble, with a thatched roof, hipped at the right-hand end and half-hipped at the left-hand end, displaying a pronounced camber to the ridge and slightly eyebrowed eaves. A rear wing has a slate hipped roof with an axial ridge stack incorporating a rendered shaft and a lowered concrete pot rising from the back wall of the main building.

Originally a barn aligned east-west, the left-hand east end was built into the hillside, with a first-floor entrance in the left end wall providing access to a former shippon below. The conversion created an entrance hall leading to a principal living room on the first floor, with bedrooms on the ground floor, and an integrated tool shed beneath the entrance hall. A rear service wing was added as an extension, initially containing a garage on the ground floor and a kitchen and servants' flat on the first floor; the garage has since been converted into a kitchen.

The exterior is an asymmetrical two-storey range with four first-floor windows, two doorways and four ground-floor windows, not aligned beneath the first-floor ones. It features 20th-century two- and three-light metal-frame casements with leaded panes and slate cills. A doorway is situated slightly to the right of the centre, featuring a 20th-century metal frame with glazed double doors and a slated canopy. A narrow door leads to the tool shed with a plank glazed door. A wide first-floor doorway, approached from higher ground at the left-hand end, has a rough timber lintel and 20th-century double doors. A circa 17th-century wooden four-light chamfered mullion window with mason’s mitres is found on the right-hand side of the rear wall, two of the mullions being missing. A wide hipped roof wing with steps in the right-hand angle provides access to the first-floor doorway.

The entrance hall is lined with veneered flush panelling. The main first-floor room has a wide doorway with double-folding doors that slide into the walls. Within this large room is a slightly raised dais, similar to a great hall. A wide, low fireplace with splayed jambs, a cambered concrete lintel, and a chamfered timber shelf supported on stone corbels is located at the rear east end. The roof structure comprises seven bays with trusses having collars halved and pegged to the faces of the principals, the apexes halved and lapped. There is an earlier cloud truss at the west end with a morticed collar and threaded purlins and ridge-piece. A hip cruck is present at the west end, with its foot cut off above the entrance doorway. All other trusses have straight feet set in the wall tops.