Product Details
Ultimate Horse Barns

Ultimate Horse Barns
By Randy Leffingwell

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Product Description

The love of horses often finds its expression in the horse barn-in the grandeur of the architecture, the extravagance of the detail, and the extent of the comforts that owners lavish on their favorite creatures. The masterpieces of equine architecture featured in this book attest to that devotion. With luxuries such as mahogany stalls, Spanish-tiled floors, and the latest in horse technology and training, these are not your average barns; rather, they attest to the extremes of elegant simplicity and outrageous glamour that convey a horse owners devotion, ambition, and style.

From prestigious and well-known horse barns such as Churchill Downs to private stables nestled in the Colorado mountains, Ultimate Horse Barns comprises a wide variety of barns certain to pique any horse owners fancy. Twenty North American barns in all, each one of a kind, they all have one thing in common-the love, appreciation, and awe of the horses they house. 

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #102791 in Books
  • Published on: 2006-10-15
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 192 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

Review

The Northwest Horse Source,

December 2006

“Generously illustrated … captures the architectural beauty of these exceptional barns as well as the love and passion the owners have for their horses.”



Ride

, June 2007

“The exceptional architecture, innovations, historical significance and beauty represented by these structures will pique the reader’s imagination and swell the expanding ranks of the horse barn aficionados.”



East Texas

Historical Journal, Spring 2007

“Architects will like this book; horse fanciers will love it.”

From the Inside Flap

The essential joy of being with horses is that it brings us in contact with the rare elements of grace, beauty, spirit, and fire. –Sharon Ralls Lemon
Ultimate Horse Barns features eighteen barns that have exceptional architecture, innovation, historical significance or beauty. The list includes structures such as:
•Culver Academies, a private school where high school students are taught leadership through equestrian education in the stately 88-year-old Castle, a massive red brick building with turrets and crenellated battlements to Meadow Farm.
•Lee and Beth Gabler’s 14-acre paradise in Santa Barbara’s Hope Ranch community that features a barn that was built to reflect Beth’s passion for horses and Lee’s love of architecture.
•George Vanderbilt’s 12,000 square foot historic horse barn on the beautiful 8,000 acre Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina.

From the Back Cover

Owners show their love and devotion towards their horses in many different ways. Sir Henry Pellatt had the names of his favorite horses embossed in goldleaf at the head of their mahogany stalls and installed brick in a herringbone pattern on the floor to lessen the risk of a horse slipping and falling. Don Cohn has two 60-foot Aqua-Tred submerged treadmills that have water jets that force heated water to massage muscles for race horse rehabilitation. The common thread through the eighteen architectual horse barn masterpieces featured in this book is each barn is an innovative, beautiful structure that embodies the owners’ love and appreciation for horses.
Author Randy Leffingwell has selected barns that possess exceptional qualities—a clever response to site challenges; meticulous attention to details, equine health, and safety; or significant historical context. The purpose of the barns range from havens for private owners to successful breeding and training facilities to historical landmarks.
Ultimate Horse Barns capture the architectural beauty of these stunning structures, as well as the love and passion the owners have for their horses.

Customer Reviews

Spectacular Accommodations for Prize Horses5
And I thought that people spent a lot of money on houses. Then again, with horses of the caliber being housed here, I suppose the cost of the Ultimate Horse Barns being shown here isn't significant after all. You could build nearly any of them for say $4 to $5 million. Needless to say these are not little sheds just to keep the horse out of the rain.

The buildings included here range from new construction to buildings that are well over a hundred years old. Many of these buildings are part of institutions such as the University of Vermont, the Kiwanis Club of West Toronto. Some belonged to the rich and famous, such as Vanderbilt. Some are working horse farms, but with a specialty in breeding or training high end horses.

Note though that these are working barns. There are horses here, horses being groomes, trained, or like 'Bailey' on page 125 looking out of his stall as if to say, 'OK, it's morning, where's my breakfast.'

Ultimate Horse Barns5
As a lover of horses and pictoral books on design, I have been looking for this type of book on horse barns for quite some time. This book contains a well thought out range of historic and new equine related buildings that have been beautifully photographed. The descriptive passages relating to each property give a very personal and charming look at the development, building process and use of the buildings. My interest in the book was primarily in the photographs which are not over powered by the text. I have purchased a number of other books on the subject but they do not compare to the quality of this publication. For horse lovers, would be barn builders and lovers of unique architecture, I highly recommend "Ultimate Horse Barns".


The architecture of the stable.4
Randy Leffingwell, Ultimate Horse Barns (Voyageur, 2006)

Funny how things work out. I had originally planned on Ultimate Horse Barns being among the first books I read in 2008; it turns out it's the first book I finished in 2009. Still, it doesn't matter when you read this book, only that, if you're interested in architecture and that sort of thing, that you do.

Leffingwell profiles fourteen of America's institutions' horse barns, ranging from the stately and classical (George Vanderbilt's Biltmore, in North Carolina) to the ultra-modern (California's Lucky Dog Ranch, whose barn wins architecture and design awards). Not just a book of photographs, this (which I have to admit is what I expected); Leffingwell offers us 8-10 pages of mixed photographs and text, giving us a quick overview of the barn's history, quotes from the people presently working there, a look at life in a working horse barn. And each one is different, which the reader might not expect.

But really, it's Randy Leffingwell. You're here for the pictures, and a fine lot they are. Leffingwell spent some quality time at each of the institutions, and it's obvious in the wide range of shots on display here. This is gorgeous work, and well worth browsing on a rainy afternoon. I do wish the book had been a bit wider-ranging; fourteen barns seems a bit small a number to really give an idea of the breadth of what's out there. But what's here is excellent, and deserves your attention. ****