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It was the rusty old hinge that did it, carefully wrapped and placed under the family Christmas tree. Jim Campbell, then an architecture student at the University of Manitoba, laughed when he opened the unlikely gift. "Gee, thanks," he said. "Very funny."

"Wait a minute," said his brother. "There's something else attached to that."

Something else turned out to be a dilapidated barn standing on a site a few kilometres from the 1870s homestead near Duntroon, Ont., (about 20 kilometres south of Collingwood) that Mr. Campbell inherited from his father and grandfather, and where he still lives with his wife Suzanne and their two young daughters.

With the help of a local builder and artist, Don Miller, who, Mr. Campbell says, "taught me everything I know," the young man took the old barn apart piece by hand-hewn piece and re-erected it as his studio.

That was 10 years ago, and it marked the beginning of his love affair with what he now calls "crappy old wood."

Not that he was any stranger to old wood. Mr. Campbell had been working with it for most of his life.

"My dad would take down a wood shed and we would build a new one from leftovers, old hydro poles, found materials, whatever was lying around," he says. But until the hinge and Mr. Miller came into his life, he viewed all those weathered boards and beams as little more than recyclables.

"Don Miller made me see it as more than just material," he says. As the two men dismantled the old building, Mr. Campbell learned the structural principles that went into holding the barn together. "Don taught me the joinery," he says, and helped him to appreciate the simple intricacies of post-and-beam construction.

Today, the still-boyish 43-year-old architecture graduate (and owner of Rockside Campbell Design Inc.) is something of an expert on barn construction, with dozens of barn and barn-conversion projects under his belt.

There's nothing new about turning barns into houses. But Mr. Campbell has taken the exercise a step further than the somewhat predictable chintz and wagon-wheel conversions that were popular in the 1970s and '80s.

One blisteringly hot day this summer, he agreed to take me on a tour of some of his projects in the rolling hills south of Collingwood, an area where my husband and I recently bought a century farm.

Before we start out, I ask him to take a look at our own barn, a crumbling monolith that is gradually being reclaimed by the weather and the weeds. To my surprise, he declares it structurally sound.

Shafts of chaff-laden sunlight penetrate the cavernous space as Mr. Campbell runs his hands over 18-inch-thick pine beams that he says are likely about 130 years old. He can tell by the axe marks, uneven gouges where the round logs were hewn by hand into square beams, some of them more than 60 feet long. By the 1880s, he explains, sawmills were operating throughout the region and the huge logs would have been milled mechanically.

Above our heads, high up in the rafters, hang two notched wooden discs, each about four feet across. Mr. Campbell identifies these as "rack lifters," giant horse-powered winches used, in the days before hay and straw came in neat round bales, to lift the bed of the wagon off its base high into the loft where the hay was forked by hand into the mow.

Now, as Ontario's old barns gradually deteriorate and disappear, these rural artifacts sit in silent testimony to a forgotten era.

A few kilometres to the west, Mr. Campbell has helped to preserve and transform a barn much like ours into a weekend haven for Jim McPherson and his wife, Dawn. This particular barn began its life on Mr. McPherson's grandfather's farm near Paris, Ont. Last year, the Toronto lawyer had the structure dismantled and moved in its entirety to a property he owns near the village of Creemore. With Mr. Campbell's help, Mr. McPherson has re-erected it as a monument to his grandfather's memory and his own youth.

The original old wood has been used everywhere — in the floors, the doors and the walls. Much of the furniture and cabinetry is fashioned from planks made from American chestnut trees that Mr. McPherson's grandfather had the foresight to fell and mill before they were wiped out in a blight that swept across North America in the 1940s.

In the living room, high up under the beamed and vaulted ceiling hang a pair of rack lifters, identical to the ones in my barn, looking for all the world like oversized parasols — decorative in this updated setting, almost playful, their utilitarian roots far behind them.

What, I ask Mr. Campbell, is it about old wood?

"For one thing," he says, "its appeal lies in its weathering. Not just the effects of the sun, rain and wind, but also of human interaction. Think of the way centuries of beeswax polish alter a terrazzo floor in Venice, or the damage done to a factory column from a careless forklift driver."

Age and use give the old materials what Mr. Campbell calls "grace," a term he borrows from his mentor, Mr. Miller.

"It is the many scars, mistakes and redundancies. I think this is what makes it so appealing to those of us who have the same qualities."

Beside a windswept stretch of highway in Ontario's Grey County sits a small stone cottage backing on to a rolling meadow where cattle graze. The landscape is harsh, spare and beautiful. Mr. Campbell is showing me one of his favourite projects. At first you don't see it — the addition (not yet finished) that he has designed as a granny flat for his client, Mary Anne Tupling's 76-year-old mother.

Then you notice the tumble of black boxes stepping down a gravelly slope behind the small 1850s house; they look like discarded building blocks, so modest in scale and texture that they nearly disappear.

Expansive windows overlook the fields; nothing fancy, just unadorned vinyl-clad windows with no ornament, no trim. The new wing, in sharp contrast to the main house, is almost defiantly modernist, until you look closely at the exterior, which is covered in blackened and peeling tin cladding with a barely discernible scalloped pattern pressed into its battered surface.

"Finding these was a complete piece of luck," says Mr. Campbell, running his hand over the sheets of old steel. He and Mr. Miller had taken down a small, dilapidated barn on the property in order to use the wood in Ms. Tupling's granny flat. Underneath the barn's brown corrugated metal siding, they found the original layer of pressed tin with its tarpapered coating.

When Mr. Campbell suggested using it on the outside of her house, Ms. Tupling was skeptical. But at the architect's urging she agreed.

"I had to go away for a few days," she says, "and when I came back, the siding was up. I was stunned by how wonderful it was. We walked back into the field to take it in and Jim looked at me and he said, 'You're a brave woman, Mary Anne.'ƒ|"

The interior of the addition would be severe if it weren't for the "bones," what Mr. Campbell calls "the ribs of the whale," which support the structure — thick, hand-hewn barn beams pegged and assembled in the old way, weaving the upper and lower levels together into an integrated whole. As much as possible, he and Mr. Miller used materials reclaimed from the property in the construction. The doors and floors and cabinetry were all made using "crappy old wood" from the barn.

"We wanted to build in a conserving not a consuming style," says Ms. Tupling, a landscape architect, who has lived in Britain and the United States, but whose Grey County roots go back five generations. She and her husband, Kit Cooper, also wanted to push the architectural envelope a little. "We had a real appreciation for the value of the existing historic house, but we didn't want to live in a hooped skirt."

They chose Mr. Campbell for the project, Ms. Tupling says, "because he respects old-fashioned values, and yet he's a fearless designer.

"When we first met," she continues, "we were like dogs sniffing around each other. I said to him: 'I don't want dormers and I don't like quarter-round.' And all Jim did was nod his head."

It was this characteristic economy of gesture and sensibility that clinched the deal. That, and a disdain for ostentation, and an understanding, Ms. Tupling says, "that economy does not have to reflect meanness of spirit."

She also gives much credit for the odd charm of the place to Mr. Campbell's wife and business partner, Suzanne Wesetvik. "She's responsible for many of the quirkier details," Ms. Tupling says.

Indeed, minimalism tempered by the unexpected imperfections of the old materials is what excites Mr. Campbell. "The minimalism isn't the focus," he says. "It acts as a backdrop, just like the Canadian mentality, and our gift for not showboating." In the same way that a stark expanse of snow, or a barren rocky shield set off the beauty of the forests and mountains and flowers. "We are masters at letting nature dictate form," Mr. Campbell says.

He also bridles a little at the term "modernist," the label he says people automatically give the Tupling-Cooper addition "because it has a flat roof and doesn't mimic historical form.

"Couldn't we just call it 'responsive architecture'? — architecture that is the product of forces that exist, the materials on hand, the needs and dreams of the client, the bylaws, the budget, the weather, the lay of the land?"

Ms. Tupling speaks of the "combination of economy and generosity" that informs the building, an apparent contradiction that is present in the architect himself, who she points out is "both worldly and of humble origins." These are the dualities that provide a satisfying tension present in Mr. Campbell's designs: the marriage of old and new, of tradition and innovation, of simplicity and sophistication.

All of these come together in the rural grandeur of the McPherson barn and the offbeat symmetry of the Tupling-Cooper house. "Sometimes it reminds me of a couple having an argument," Mr. Campbell says of the latter — "the Darth Vader addition versus the pretty little cottage." Pleased with the allusion, he smiles.

"It's like those couples you know who you wonder how they have lasted all these years," he says, "until you realize that it's a yin-yang thing." Dissonance creating its own kind of harmony.

Rockside Campbell Design Inc. can be reached at 705-446-2506.