Church Street, Edenton, North Carolina
I found my thrill on Strawberry Hill. Well, technically adjacent to Strawberry Hill, because just like Higbee Cottage and Big Higbee in Ohio, today's house is the mini version of the Strawberry Hill estate next door.
Say hello to Little Strawberry. The listing says it was built around 1900, but there are clues that it's at least 50 years older than that.
Its front porch, heart pine floors, and center hall floorplan echo that of the c. 1785 house next door. Unlike the formal feeling Strawberry Hill has though, Little Strawberry is as cute as a button.
Or maybe I should describe it as pretty, because Edenton, North Carolina calls itself the prettiest small town in the south. I'll decorate accordingly.
Much of it is untouched from those days and much of it, like Strawberry Hill, The Cupola House, and the 1886 Roanoke River Lighthouse, are on the National Register of Historic Places:
Its front porch, heart pine floors, and center hall floorplan echo that of the c. 1785 house next door. Unlike the formal feeling Strawberry Hill has though, Little Strawberry is as cute as a button.
{Amanda Lindroth, with some changes}
Amanda Lindroth's pretty, coastal style will also work well with the existing dining room color:
The same decorating scheme will work in the existing kitchen...
...and give me an excuse to match it with one of my favorite kitchen pins:
Little Strawberry was originally a "two over four" house, with the "four" being the living and dining rooms, kitchen and master bedroom. This family room and sunporch addition make it a two over six:
Something about this sunporch makes me want to go twirl in circles in there. It's like a ballet studio and it just makes the house.
But let's go back and finish "the four" tour before we go upstairs.
I forgot to count the master bathroom in my calculations. Make it "two over six point five."
The upstairs two is really a three, with a sunny bathroom tucked between the two bedrooms:
Rounding out the tour, does this delightful screened-in porch also count as a room? Since I would spend all my time there, I'll say yes.
The garage (with a cupola!) behind the house was the house's original kitchen -- probably not just Little Strawberry's kitchen, but Strawberry Hill's as well. After all, the two houses are only 59 feet apart:
As I said, Strawberry Hill is more formal than Little Strawberry...
...but it also has a family room and porch additions:
I also tracked down yet another house related to Strawberry Hill. This is the Pack House Inn, Strawberry Hill's original tobacco packing building. It was moved to the grounds of the Inner Banks Inn in Edenton in the late 1980's.
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If this is making you think that Edenton has no shortage of pretty places, you'd be correct. (It is the prettiest small town in the south, after all.) Edenton is on the Inner Banks and served as North Carolina's pre-Colonial capital.