When rug weaver and textile designer Elizabeth Eakins and her lawyer husband, Jerry Wigglesworth, bought a farm on the Kansas prairie, he went back to school to learn to be a sheep farmer and she wanted a weaving studio.
Photography via Khanna Schultz.
Brooklyn-based architects Vrinda Khanna and Robert Schultz of Khanna Schultz designed a loom house for Eakins, a lofty studio that doubles as guest space and complements rather than competes with the property’s main building, a limestone farmhouse built in the 1870s.
The loom house is 50 feet away from main house.
Inside the loom house Eakins has a spacious weaving studio and a view of gently rolling meadows in a shallow valley that drops away from the building.
Eakins and Wigglesworth have 100 long-wooled Border Leicester sheep.
The view from the main house is of the outbuilding’s front porch and entryway.
The large limestone step was found on the property.
“We wanted the building to reflect the small-town vernacular in Kansas, so the first time I visited, we looked around a lot of little towns,” says Schultz.
A wood-burning stove is the studio’s heat source in winter.
“There was an old barn on the property, but it blew down around the time the clients bought it,” says Schultz.
Behind a sliding barn door is an alcove with a Murphy bed, enabling the studio to do double duty as a guesthouse.
Throughout the house are double-hung, two-over-two Marvin windows.
Wood boards in the entry and bathroom are from the old barn that blew down.
A limestone foundation, made of local stone, also references the design of the main house (visible in the distance).
The loom house sits in a grove of deciduous trees.