Black Forest house

The Black Forest house (German: Schwarzwaldhaus) is a byre-dwelling that is found mainly in the central and southern parts of the Black Forest in southwestern Germany. It is characterised externally by a long hipped or half-hipped roof that descends to the height of the ground floor. This type of dwelling is suited to the conditions of the Black Forest: hillside locations, broad tracks, high levels of snowfall and heavy wind loading. Individual farms, such as the Hierahof near Kappel, which are still worked today, are over 400 years old. The Black Forest house is described by Dickinson as very characteristic of the Swabian farmstead type.

Depending on the site of the individual farms various types of Black Forest house have emerged which are designed to cope with the specific climatic situation. Hermann Schilli, the initiator of the open-air museum of Vogtsbauernhof distinguishes seven types of Black Forest house:

The house combines both living and working rooms, as well as animal stalls, under one roof. The largely wooden superstructure of the house usually rests on a basement made of natural stone.

The great roof, with its long overhangs, sweeps right down to the ground floor at the sides, shading the walls of the house in summer whilst allowing the sun, now much lower in the sky, to warm the walls in winter. Depending on the situation, the roof was covered with wooden shingles or thatch, whilst today they are generally covered with tiles. In the high regions of the Black Forest, where cattle farming and forestry predominate, shingles are overwhelmingly used, whilst in the valleys, thatch is most common. The half-hipped roof, with its sides sloping in all directions, reduces the wind loading area and reduces wear.

The attic acts as a hayloft and is accessed via a ramp or a footbridge from the rising slope behind the house. The often dormer-shaped entrance is known in Alemannic as a "Ifahrhüsli". The hay can easily be thrown down into the stalls below from the hayloft through a so-called hay hatch (Heuloch, literally "hay hole").

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Wikipedia