Rebuilt barn’s journey to Purdue ends with opening of The Lawrence
Cunningham Restaurant Group’s farm-to-table concept opens in a 1937 barn donated by a Purdue trustee and moved, piece by piece, to Discovery Park District
On Monday, the day The Lawrence started taking lunch and dinner reservations in a cavernous, rebuilt barn just off Airport Road in West Lafayette, Mike Cunningham, CEO of the Indianapolis-based Cunningham Restaurant Group, said the company was in a place where “we love unique opportunities.”
“Just look around,” Cunningham said Monday morning, after grand opening ceremonies as staff prepared for the first lunch traffic. “This definitely qualifies.”
The restaurant and events facility – serving an American bistro, farm-to-table menu in 10,600-square-feet under barn beams and rafters that make cathedral ceilings 45 feet high – comes with a backstory built in.
The way Sonny Beck tells it, when he got the call from Purdue Research Foundation about whether he knew about any barns around that might be available, he asked: “Big barn? Small barn? I can probably tell you about a lot of barns.”
“I asked them, ‘What do need it for? What do you have in mind?’” Beck, CEO of Beck’s Hybrids and a Purdue trustee since 2013, said. “When they told me what they were thinking, I said, ‘I know just the one.’”
That was in 2021, when PRF was putting out feelers for an anchor retail space for potential restaurants and an event venue as a walkable gathering spot in the Discovery Park District being developed just west of Purdue’s campus.
Jeremy Slater, vice president for real estate and partnerships for Purdue Research Foundation, said he and Rich Michal, then PRF’s chief facilities officer, had been looking at other live-work-play community concepts as they mapped out plans for Purdue’s version.
“We started to see that a lot of the places that had cool vibes were repurposed buildings,” Slater said.
Slater said that led them to play around with the idea of a barn, tipping to Purdue’s history in agriculture. And that led them, in turn, to Beck.
Beck said his family bought the 72-by-142-foot barn and 15 acres around it near Sheridan in 1990. Beck said a newspaper article from a year after it was built in 1937 had reported it was the biggest barn of its kind built in Indiana, as of that time.
Beck said by 1990, it was being used as a farrowing house for pigs, with an upper level used to store hay. Beck said his family used the space for two decades to store equipment.
“We always thought it could be a restaurant someday,” Beck said. “But it was going to be a while, we figured, because it wasn’t really close enough to anything, yet.”
Beck was familiar with PRF’s developing plans for Discovery Park District, and once he knew what sort of barn it was after, “I knew this one could do the trick.”
Beck’s family donated the barn to Purdue and also gave $100,000 to help pay to dismantle, move and reassemble it roughly 50 miles away.
In 2021, an architect worked with Purdue professors who specialize in wood science to identify the lumber used to build the barn and determine its strength. Slater said each piece of lumber was 3D scanned, cleaned and tested, before it was stored for reassembly at Purdue.
Slater said the rebuild essentially included three pieces, with a steel structure to meet modern codes, the reassembled beams and barn boards and then an exterior shell that could accommodate insulation and roofing.
Slater said the pieces initially sat in storage until PRF landed on the Cunningham Restaurant Group to operate the facility in March 2024.
The Lawrence – named for Lawrence Beck, the founder of Beck’s Hybrids – is Cunningham’s 22nd concept and 46th restaurant.
The Cunningham Restaurant Group has one of its 17 BRU Burger locations at Second and Main streets in downtown Lafayette, along with a range of concepts in the Indianapolis area, including Mesh, Rize, Stonecreek Dining Company, Vida, Livery and Tavern at the Point.
Cunningham said the initial suggestion was to include a brewery in the barn.
“That was something we were not interested in because we saw that beer consumption was sliding in the marketplace, and it’s really not what we do as a company,” Cunningham said. “We’re a creative bunch, so our proposal for the project is what you see today.”
Cunningham said The Lawrence was geared as a small, boutique restaurant and events center, which seats 130 in the restaurant, 42 on a patio and room for about 190 in a private room. The walls in the restaurant include a collection of photos of other restored barns curated by the Indiana Barn Foundation.
“Farm-to-table is an overused term sometimes,” Cunningham said. “But we think the menu still speaks to that, because we’re using fresh, unique ingredients, and we really hope that people appreciate something different. There’s nothing like this in the community right now.”
Cunningham said The Lawrence fits with the company’s locations in other repurposed buildings, putting it among his top three, along with a BRU Burger location in a 1930s Greyhound bus terminal that Indiana Landmarks helped restore in Evansville and the Livery location in Indianapolis, which is in an old livery building.
“This one fits right in,” Cunningham said.
Here’s another look inside The Lawrence, via Elyse Daniel’s ‘The Happy Hours’ feed:
Work continues on public spaces next door at Squirrel Park, near the southeast corner of Airport Road and Mitch Daniels Boulevard. Plans presented in 2025 to the West Lafayette Redevelopment Commission included a playground, pedestrian paths, a plaza, a shade stage and pavilion, landscaping, lighting, utilities and parking.
For more: The Lawrence is at 150 McCutcheon Drive in West Lafayette. Here’s a way into the menu and hours.
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Tips, story ideas? I’m at davebangert1@gmail.com.
Hopefully Cunningham group will do something to draw in a student crowd to the restaurant. As their menus are advertised now, there is not much that the “average” college student would go for or could afford.