Bill and Maureen Whichard commissioned an oil painting to hang above their fireplace. For Bill, the subject matter was straightforward: two pairs of feet propped up on their front-porch railing, the idyllic Edenton Bay sparkling in the background.

But for Maureen, it was a little more nuanced. Back then, in 2019, it didn’t feel like their front porch. The couple had recently married — for each, a second marriage — and Maureen had moved into the historic Edenton home that Bill had owned for years.

Bill & Maureen Whichard photograph by Chris Rogers

Overlooking the Courthouse Green, informally known as the town’s waterfront “central park” and just steps from the oldest courthouse still in use in North Carolina, the 1879 Victorian-style home that’s tucked among a series of other historic houses on East King Street, is the picture of charm.

“From the porch, we can see the water. This is Bill’s favorite spot,” Maureen says. She shared Bill’s love of the view — and his appreciation for a late-afternoon cocktail and visits with neighbors. But she couldn’t help feeling differently about the house itself. “There was conversation about, ‘Well, I’d really like to have a place that is ours, but Bill loves this location.’”

Bill understood how his new wife felt, and he had a solution. “This was the house my kids grew up in. We lived here 27 years,” he says. “We needed to get Maureen’s signature on the house.”

The Whichards’ house was built where Edenton’s grandest homes were located in the 1760s. From the front porch, the couple can see Edenton Bay. photograph by Chris Rogers

After a heartfelt conversation with Bill’s then-college-age children, Maureen commissioned a different kind of art — the complete overhaul of their kitchen, den, and office. The design team was an obvious choice: Down East Preservation, a local group that lives, eats, and breathes historic preservation.

Bill and his children agreed that the inside needed work. “I’m social and never liked how closed-off the rooms felt,” he says. “If you were in the den and someone else was in the kitchen, cooking, you were completely separated. I’d always wanted an open floor plan, but I didn’t think this house had all that possibility.”

Down East Preservation’s Briley Rascoe took the lead on design. “The layout was choppy. You walked in and went into the den and down a little hallway to get to the kitchen with very low ceilings — you felt claustrophobic,” Rascoe says. “Just off the kitchen was Bill’s office. It was dinosaur green with these weird windows — it actually had a platform with a hot tub. We called it the hot tub time machine.”

• • •

Old homes have a reputation for revealing surprises during renovations, but nobody expected the revelation that was unearthed when Maureen asked if they could knock down the wall between the cramped butler’s pantry and the kitchen.

“When we pulled back the drywall, we learned why the ceilings were so low,” Rascoe says. The kitchen had another life: It was an entirely separate building at one time. “We were looking at a 1760s smokehouse that, based on other work in the neighborhood, we believe was once part of a grand 18th-century homesite.”

Down East Preservation found a historical document that confirmed their suspicions. In 1769, Royal Gov. William Tryon commissioned surveyor and cartographer Claude Joseph Sauthier to create a map of Edenton. “That map shows two large homesites on the 200 block of East King Street, and one of them is right where the Whichard house now sits,” Rascoe says.

The beams that vault the Whichards’ kitchen ceiling were once part of an 18th-century smokehouse that was hiding behind the home’s drywall. photograph by Chris Rogers

When the Whichards’ home was built more than a century later in 1879, the frugal builder incorporated the frame of the smokehouse as the Whichard home’s kitchen. Down East Preservation salvaged the original smokehouse beams — coated with 200 years of smoke and salt — and used them to vault the new kitchen.

“They were absolutely perfect for the accents we wanted to put in the kitchen and the office ceiling,” Bill says. “And the fact that they have been a part of the house since it was built in 1879 was icing on the cake.”

In order for Maureen to feel at home in her new space, Rascoe knew that the interior design choices would be just as important as the home’s structural changes. As she and Maureen pored over lifestyle magazines, Maureen’s interior style emerged: natural, softer colors; dark brown; and contrast — think light walls with dark floors.

“The final sprinkle was what I like to call a God wink.”

“I like to find a unique design element and sprinkle it throughout,” Rascoe says. In the case of the kitchen, their first building block, a massive copper hood, informed their future design decisions. Next, they chose a copper farmhouse sink.

Then, it was time to select a countertop. Originally, a soapstone was suggested, but when Maureen spotted a unique quartzite countertop ribboned with copper during a field trip to a stoneyard in Richmond, Virginia, she knew that it was perfect.

“The final sprinkle was what I like to call a God wink,” Rascoe says. During the renovation, the Down East Preservation team uncovered original copper plumbing pipes. After hours of sanding and shining the pipes, they reintroduced them as legs on the kitchen island.

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Without the butler’s pantry, Bill has the open floor plan he always wanted: The kitchen leads directly into a cozy den anchored by the original brick fireplace. And on either side of the fireplace, two swivel chairs comfortably accommodate Bill’s social energy. “Bill can sit in one place and swivel this way and that, talking to everybody,” Maureen says, laughing. “He’s like a kid in a candy store.”

Maureen, on the other hand, goes from chair to chair, taking in the views. From her kitchen island barstools, she admires the handmade white zellige tiles lining the backsplash. From her new corner coffee nook, she appreciates the side yard’s showy ginkgo, hidden before the renovation. And, of course, there’s the view of Edenton Bay from their front porch.

Now, it feels like home. Their home. Maureen remembers the moment in the renovation when Rascoe’s prediction — that one day, Maureen would love the house just as much as Bill loved it — came true. “I called Briley and I said, ‘I’m sitting in my kitchen, and I never want to leave.’”