Furniture-maker Dietrich Baeu spent nearly 20 years living above his manufacturing space.

Gallery

Walk through the House of the Week

And, he and his wife, Yvette, said, they have loved every minute of life inside the 1850s former mill in Hope Valley. The 10,000-square-foot brick building with a tower in the front and back had lots of notable details: giant 12-over-12 windows, interior brick walls, exposed beams and lots of open space.

Baeu’s furniture-producing business is found on the ground floor; the couple’s living quarters and a gallery/studio are on the second floor.

“For us, it has been about waking up every morning and seeing the sun shining through the windows,” Yvette said. “Dietrich’s commute is a walk downstairs.”

Dietrich Baeu (pronounced “boy”) said that he’s getting ready to retire. He has decided to sell the building, which was once a yarn manufacturer. The price is $1.6 million for 9.6 acres (including a six-acre pond), a one-bedroom stone cottage and a turbine that once generated electric power. “We just don’t have the time to fix it [the turbine],” he said. “When it was working, we didn’t pay electricity for about eight months out of the year.”

Above the 5,000-square-foot wood shop where, Baeu added, he still creates custom pieces of furniture, the living space measured 2,700 square feet. The remaining 2,300 square feet was a studio/gallery with a full bath, storage and an office.

You enter the apartment and studio through doors on a striking second-floor landing. On the landing, there are hardwood floors, a lift for transporting furniture, and a wooden door that opens to a view of the country setting. He said, “In the summer, we never close the door.”

Ceilings on the second-level soared two-stories, and feature the original beams spanning the width of the floor. A third floor existed some 60 years ago but it was never replaced after a mill fire in 1947.

After the fire, the mill owner pulled off the second-floor ceiling and put a flat roof over it, he said. “Eventually, Yvette and I grew tired of dealing with the leaks from the flat room so we added the hipped pitched roof in the early 1990s.”

They kept the wide-plank wood floors, which were laid down on a slant, in the living area. “People always respond to the floors,” Yvette said. “It’s unusual to see this type of design.”

As planks wore out, the Baeus said, they replaced them with as close to a match as they could find. “The floors are southern yellow pine,” he added. “We can still find replacements today.”

The Baeus retained the openness by keeping the exposed beams, brick walls, giant windows and adding skylights. They painted the interior walls white.

The dining area, living room, den and kitchen flow into each other; all the rooms feature exposed brick walls. There are four bedrooms, which included a master suite. It has a separate bathroom, and built-in storage and dressers custom-made by Dietrich in the downstairs workshop.

The other full bathroom in the home houses the washer and dryer. It has a floor-to-ceiling wide window with a view of the creek, woods and turbine. Dietrich Baeu added, “I always tell people our bathroom has the best view in the house.”

The apartment has an entrance into the gallery/studio via a butler’s pantry, which contains cabinets built by Baeu, a sink and another dishwasher. French doors lead to a deck. It has circular staircase that connected the deck to the backyard.

The property also includes a finishing room off of the ground floor woodshop, which, Baeu said, “predated the building. I believe it dates back to the 1830s.” There’s an automatic garage door leading into the manufacturing area on the ground floor. He noted that many cars could be stored in the ground level.

In the late 1940s, the building was refurbished, and turned into an arms factory, Baeu said. During the World War II years, he noted that the ground floor was strengthened even more by the addition of steel beams, which span the width of the building.

Dietrich Baeu discovered the property in the late 1980s via an advertisement in the New York Times. The ad for this former mill building in Hope Valley was listed in the section titled “country homes and estates.”

At the time, he was living in New Jersey, and had been bemoaning the expense of leasing manufacturing space for his growing furniture business. He added, “This came along at the right time.”

In addition, the property includes a stone cottage with a steeply pitched gable roof, and dormer that houses the only bedroom. It has an L-shaped floor plan with an eat-in kitchen and full bath.

Yvette added that she liked the openness of the main building, the charm of the cottage, and the nearby town of Hopkinton. “This is an enormously rich community with a town-feel and interesting stores.”

The 1850s mixed-use 10,000-square-foot mill building and one-bedroom stone cottage on more than 9 acres, with a 6-acre pond, is listed for $1.6 million. Taxes are $8,000 and it has oil heat. Georgia J. Ure, Ure Realty, (401) 539-2160, has the listing. How to submit a House of the Week

A different House of the Week appears each Saturday in the projoHomes section of The Providence Journal. The feature tells the story of the house and the people who have lived in it. If you would like us to consider a house for sale as a subject of this news feature, send a photo, information about the house and why it is of interest, to Faye Zuckerman, real estate writer,

75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902; fax (401) 277-8250; or e-mail pjhomes@projo.com. For more information, call (401) 277-7333.

fzuckerm@projo.com