Farmer's Homestead, Desesti, Maramures County

The house has three rooms and two floors (with a basement downstairs and the living quarters upstairs), the veranda („şatra”) spread across two sides on the first floor and three sides on the second floor, with 25 carved poles and arches representing an architectural climax for historical Maramureş, representative of the superior building and decorative skills of Maramureş masters and the extraordinary economic power of the locals.
The barn also has two floors, with the stable on the first floor, and the threshing area and the second stable on the second floor. The barn was functionally adapted to the steep terrain and for installing the horse activated threshing machine (the area is enlarged to create space for the new installations and the increased number of participants to the cereal threshing). Adding gates, doors and windows, destined to bring the grain sheaves in or to evacuate the straws and grains, modified the walls of the construction. The barn represents one important moment in time at the beginning of the last century when new tools and industrial semi-mechanized machines were being introduced.
The shed, or „colejna”, is made of vertical poles and closed with boards in the back and on the right side and has two distinct parts: the pigsties made from horizontal oak logs joined with square locks and the shelter for means of transportation and agricultural machines. Between the ceiling of the chicken coops and the cover of double-stitched fir shingles they created a semi-open space to deposit the corncobs.
The maize barn, made of nut tree wattle, has a truncated cone and elliptical shape with a small downward opening. The esthetics of this construction are to be found in its rhythmical wattle plait and in the gray belt that surrounds the construction at the middle height of the walls.
The hayloft is an original, atypical construction (with four fir poles delineating a square perimeter and united at the middle height by a horizontal beam yoke). In order to keep the hay secured inside there are oblique fir boards between the poles and beams, creating the impression of a spider web that amplifies the esthetics of the construction.
The gate preserves the old Maramureş traditional gate style, with three columns joined by the big and the small crown above the door. All elements are carved in bas-relief with specific motifs: rope, fir tree, and sun disc. In the boarded area above the door there is a vase with flowered fretwork.