Or perhaps, Tim, similarly
The public buildings/town buildings were built by professional carpenters, based in town or a nearby city, While the barns and many houses may have been built by the farmers themselves.
That's a very common situation in Europe. You see, for example, drastically different building going on at the same time in the cities of Bern, Thun, etc. while just a stone's throw away out in the countryside farmers and rural carpenters build things in ways that had been abandoned sometimes centuries earlier in the cities. Then at the same time, the rural villages might hire a city carpenter to build a new roof for the church, or a granary, etc. and these often stand out as vastly different from other rural forms.
You actually still have this situation today, where sometimes the rural carpenters are still building things in very old ways, while some wealthy farmer might hire a crew from the city to build a sleek new engineered timber structure or steel building.
