Ann Arbor architect Charles Bultman rescues historic barns destined for the sawdust pile and resurrects them into new, high-end homes across the country.

He’s built sprawling chalets in Sun Valley and Nantucket-inspired homes in Virginia using the rough-hewn posts and beams of old barns as the skeleton and sometimes other barn wood (Bultman calls them barn parts) for floors, exteriors or inside trim.

While many of what Bultman calls “barn homes” come with the rustic feel of worn wood with a patina of time, he’s incorporated many styles into his designs.

“Barns don’t predict the style,” he said.

What they do have in common is warmth: Interiors rich with worn wood that come with texture and a history.

“They make a really warm and inviting interior. They have history, they have a story to them,” Bultman said. “At the same time, it preserves a barn.”

What they don’t do is stay on the original site. The frames are disassembled, cleaned and sometimes shipped across country where they are reassembled (usually by the same craftsperson who took it down) and used as a frame for a new structure. He only uses barns that are going to be razed.

While Bultman is a full-service architect, focusing on residential and small commercial projects, about half of his practice is with barns.

His first barn house was in 1999 in Sun Valley. He was working for an Ann Arbor firm at the time that had some experience in barn houses, and Bultman helped design a 13,000-square-foot chalet that incorporated five historic barns into the design.

He was hooked. Twelve years later, Bultman has worked on nearly 20 barn projects, mostly houses but also a commercial nursery and what he calls a party barn. His barn houses are located from Arizona to New Hampshire, with many of them concentrated in barn-loving New England.

“You get a kind of warmth and history and quality you don’t get with a drywall house,” Bultman said. “You can use new (wood), which means it’s bright. With barn wood, the colors are muted. You can get it with new materials, but it’s a 100-year process.”

Many barns have become obsolete, either in the way of development or too small for today’s large farm equipment and limping into disrepair.

“Slowly, they become a liability,” Bultman said. “They stop being useful.”

Sometime landowners ask a relatively small fee for the barn frame, Bultman said. Sometimes they just want the structure removed. But the real expense is in taking the barn down, cleaning it and reassembling it at a new location.

While he doesn’t usually scout for the barn frames himself -- that’s a huge time-eater -- there’s a network of people who do. They play matchmaker, connecting people looking for a barn frame with landowners interesting in removing a barn.

“Finding a barn is a lot like adopting a child,” he said. “Everyone knows where their barn comes from,” he said.

Barns were made from trees that grew closest to the farm: That means hardwoods such as oak, chestnut and walnut in the Midwest along with some softer woods such as pine.

New England barns were usually constructed from pine, spruce and hemlock. The posts are usually hewn, not sawed (the sawmill was too far to travel), giving them rich texture and a rustic look. And their sizes are not uniform, even within a single post or beam: It can measure 8 inches in one spot and nine inches farther up, Bultman said.

While his barn houses are usually open, airy and have lofted space, they can be rustic, quaint or even ultra-modern.

A relatively small barn house project on Madeline Island in Wisconsin includes a 30-foot by 40-foot barn, a small addition, a screened porch and a deck. There is no drywall inside the house. Instead, 10,000 square feet of barn wood was used to line the walls. For the floors, flooring from an pre-Civil War rendering plant in Missouri (think manure) was shipped to the site, cleaned, installed and further scuffed by construction workers to create a deeply rich surface, Bultman said.

Some of his barn houses have two personalities - a rustic barn-like exterior and an urban, modern interior. A Massachusetts barn house he designed has exposed ductwork, exposed metal chimney flue, hammered iron railings and a tiled foyer, creating an industrial/urban look. One of his houses has painted window wood, giving it a colonial feel. One client wall-papered a loft.

“Barns were the industrial building of their day,” Bultman said. “They accommodate a huge range of styles.”

Barn houses tend not to be for the budget-minded. They tend to cost 50 percent more than traditional new housing, he said, and he hasn’t worked on one that has come in less than $1 million.

But there are ways to cut corners:

The customer who used the rendering plant floor ended up paying only $3 a foot to purchase, ship and clean the floor. A Pennsylvania customer he’s working with now is on the prowl for creative and inexpensive materials for a barn house.

While Bultman has never built a barn house in Washtenaw County, he’s designed them around the country, visiting on-site as needed. Having an architect live a distance from the project is old-school, he said. Think of Frank Lloyd Wright, the country’s most famous architect who was based in Chicago but who had projects from coast to coast.