Bundoran Farm, a sustainable development woven into a 2,300 acre working farm, is a national model for partnership between farming and development. Geobarns was chosen to design and build its centerpiece amenity: a new center for administration, education and community gatherings.
The 2,300 acre Bundoran Farm, outside Charlottesville, Virginia, is the home of an ambitious project which has been recognized as a model for sustainable development of working landscapes. Homesites, ecological assets, and agricultural production are sensitively designed to allow residents to live, work, hike and otherwise enjoy life among a spectacular working farm. This sensitivity brought the development team to Geobarns for the signature amenity and administrative center of the farm, the Baldwin Center for Preservation Development.
This two story structure is designed to accommodate administrative offices, conference spaces, a catering kitchen and lounge, with an unobstructed upper floor gathering space for community-wide educational and arts programming. Its bank-barn design makes both programs accessible, but operable separately. The Center was built on the site of former farm housing, allowing a completely new structure to be inserted adjacent to irreplaceable mature trees and hedges. The building has become the center of a thriving conservation-oriented rural community, as well as the headquarters for a successful and innovative development firm.
A community and a culture needs a place to gather. Geobarns helped us to solve a difficult problem: this building had to be central and welcoming, and to accommodate all manner of management activities and public events, but it also had to be modest, and we hoped for a building that looked like part of the landscape. We started with a design by a pretty well-known architect, and the budget for that building was three times our allowance. Geobarns helped us realize that we could build simply, employing the barn archetype that already existed throughout this glorious landscape. After changing course, we reconceived the project with Geobarns and went from design to opening day in about eight months. The building is a successful center for operations, but more importantly it’s a statement of our community values that communicates a lifestyle that’s both simpler and richer than living in a conventional subdivision.
– David, Bundoran Farm Project Manager
