Man Turns Crumbling 1957 Stone Ruin Into His Dream Home in Just One Year

The attic bedroom

The attic may be the biggest surprise inside the house. What had once been part of a failing roof structure became a cosy wooden bedroom, reached by a staircase that Luxon also built as part of the renovation. Because the room sits directly beneath the roof, making it comfortable meant doing much more than installing a bed and calling it finished.

Luxon rebuilt the layers around the attic carefully, using boards, a vapor barrier and rock-wool insulation beneath the new metal roof. The idea was simple: keep heat inside, keep moisture away from the insulation and turn a previously unusable part of the building into a place that could actually be slept in throughout the year. A skylight brings daylight straight into the loft and also allows some of that light to reach the spaces below.

The result feels more like the sleeping loft of a traditional mountain cabin than a conventional bedroom. Timber covers much of the space and follows the angles of the roof, giving the room a snug, sheltered feeling. It also shows how little space in the old ruin was wasted during the rebuild. Yet Luxon did not stop at the walls of the house. Outside, he created one more living area that dramatically increased the amount of usable space.