I fell in love with the cozy 1810 farmhouse as soon as my realtor, Barbara O'Hare, and I pulled into its driveway.  Reality intervened when she took me inside: the kitchen was narrow, the stairs weirdly steep, the low-ceilinged bedrooms encased in faux wood-grain paneling.  Like many a first-time homebuyer, I wavered.  The detail that finally hooked me was a fact Barbara mentioned in passing: the building had once been a one-room schoolhouse.  Instantly, the tight spaces took on a romantic glow.  I could picture the 19th-century schoolmistress buttoning her calico frock and heading downstairs to stoke the woodstove for her rosy-cheeked charges.  I bought the house.

Transforming a non-residential space into a home is an enduring fantasy, one that stretches from the perennial childhood favorite The Boxcar Children to the counterculture mystique of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" church.  It's also a socially responsible form of large-scale recycling.

Adaptive reuse, as the movement to reinvent abandoned commercial properties was dubbed in the 1960s, began as a new form of urban renewal.  Mill buildings were turned into mini-malls, furniture warehouses to fern bars.  Instead of destroying derelict industrial buildings, which often had architecturally desirable features like high ceilings, large windows, exposed beams and brick, some artists and architects converted them into lofts, often combining living and studio space under one vaulting roof.  Inevitably, as lofts became trendy and real estate prices outrageous, the vogue for conversion moved up to the country.

Adaptive reuse has many faces in the Hudson Valley.  Our neighbors are living in buildings erected as train stations, churches, barns, grange halls, firehouses, chicken coops, creameries - even a 17,000-square-foot apple cooler.  "The big fantasy is the converted barn," says realtor Amy Levine, who has sold Hudson Valley properties for 27 years.  "And it isn't just artists.  It's people with straight jobs: investors, teachers, second-home owners.  There's a romantic dream about living inside an old barn."

BACK TO THE FARM
Writer and collage artist Nicole Quinn loved her blue-painted barn at first sight.  "I loved the height of it, the way it was sited in the old meadow.  You could feel its past.  The smell is slightly hay-like."  Though former owners had reconfigured the bottom floor into bed- and bathrooms, with a light-filled, open living room/kitchen/dining area, the upstairs was pure barn.  There were wooden stepladders, huge sliding doors, a rope swing dangling from one of the massive beams.  Quinn's children added a basketball hoop; her husband, Paul, claimed the hayloft as a shop space, where he putters and builds every weekend, wearing a quilted vest against winter chills.

"It's a very creative space," Quinn effuses.  "It's been used as a theater, for painting sets.  I love the old-barn feel, the rawness of it, that I can shove forty teenagers out there for a party and I don't care what they spill.  I love the sound of the rain on the tin roof.  And I loved that it wasn't red."

Barns are not the only agricultural buildings that lend themselves to residential reuse.  Sculptor Dan Feldman lives and works in a spectacular loft-style structure in Kyserike that started its life as a hatchery, where the Parnale family raised chicks for the egg-production industry.  Around 1970, painter Albert Hamoway converted the main building into a residence.  Subsequent owners added finishing touches; by the time Feldman bought it in 1996, the architectural features of the space, including a galleried living room large enough to house a cabaret, were already in place.  "My needs were very specific," says Feldman.  "I needed something industrial for metal forging, fabrication, and welding, where I could work on a large scale - thirteen, fifteen feet high.  The usual 'house with studio' I was shown didn't fit the bill; the studio was usually a small wooden outbuilding or barn which I would burn down in a heartbeat."  As soon as he decided to convert one of the former studios into a rental apartment so he could afford to maintain the huge space, it was his.

Feldman doesn't dwell on the building's past lives - "You mean does it have poultrygeists?"  he laughs when asked - but he appreciates the feathered former tenants' contribution to his vegetable garden and plum orchard: "The soil is great from all those years of chicken manure."

Actress Siri Crane had a different take on the Lyonsville chicken coop she used to rent with her mother, Sigrid Heath.  "You could almost feel all those happy hen bodies.  In the winter, we'd curl up on the couch with our feet tucked under ourselves, and we felt like chickens."  The "funny, funky little building" with the steeply slanted tin roof was Crane and Heath's first home as a twosome, without Crane's father in residence, and she found the cozy space comforting.  "It seemed appropriate somehow that we were in this totally female space, a henhouse," she says, "Just us chickens."

LIVING WITH HISTORY
Mitchell Wirth lives in the former Zena Dutch Reformed Church, built in 1913.  "I've always enjoyed and admired sacred spaces," says Wirth, whose Woodstock store, the Mad Monk, sells Buddhist antiquities and eyeglasses.  "The second I saw it, I knew immediately it was my house.... I've always been blessed and cursed to live in unusual spaces."