GUILDERLAND — Almost two years after first presenting it to the town, Christopher Beckmann received approval to use his barn on Route 146 as a special-occasion venue. 

Beckmann also received reprieve from having to install a costly sprinkler system when, as part of its approval, the town’s zoning board of appeals granted him a variance from that portion of the law, instead allowing him to install a localized alarm system. 

The 2,200-square-foot facility, to be known as the Barn at Black Creek — an historic barn which Beckmann relocated onto his parents’ property in 2017 — will host functions like weddings, their rehearsal dinners, and showers for 99, and will also act as his permanent residence.

The zoning board in 2016 granted Beckmann an area variance so the barn could be built within 75 feet of the Black Creek, while town code requires a minimum setback of 100 feet from watercourses. 

The zoning board in determining whether to grant the variance weighed if “practical difficulties or unnecessary hardship may result from enforcement of the strict letter of any provision” of the fire code, and if  “omission of an approved sprinkler system from all or part of the building [would] not significantly jeopardize human life.”

The board found that strict enforcement of the “sprinkler system code would create an unnecessary hardship” for Beckmann because the facility would be used for “small special occasions with fewer than 100 persons” in addition to being “required to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to install a sprinkler system.”

Beckmann had provided the board with a contractor estimate of close to $200,000 to run a new water line to the barn and one for nearly $100,000 to install the sprinkler system itself. The new localized alarm system will cost about $20,000. 

Beckmann’s variance request was first made in July, and it’s an ask that the board took very seriously. 

“Well, I mean, you know, it’s interesting,” Elizabeth Lott, the zoning board’s chairwoman, told Beckmann during the Feb. 21 meeting. “This is the first case that I’ve had … which allows us to actually grant a permit that doesn’t follow the fire code.”

The request, Lott said, is something that “some people might take that lightly,” but Lott and the board “take it as a big responsibility to even consider that.”

“Because we’re talking about having people in your beautiful barn, and God forbid something happens,” she said. “So it might sound like we’re being tedious and asking you too many questions about a fire that will never happen. But, you know, I think that’s the worst thing that happens with a fire: no one expects it to happen.”

Beckmann followed Lott’s remarks by pointing out the board had granted a similar variance to Clover Pond Vineyard in 2021, to which Jacqueline Coons, Guilderland’s chief building and zoning inspector, responded, “The distinguishable difference between [Beckmann’s] building and the Clover Pond building is that the Clover Pond building was a noncombustible construction type. Whereas his is the heavy timber.” Coons is a firefighter. 

Coons said, while the Beckmann barn timbers, some of which are 9 and 10 inches thick, were better than “standard lumber,” they’re still “not as resistive as the noncombustible [material].”