Brentsville Road, Paris, Kentucky
Horses, history, and hospitality. Those are the official buzzwords for Paris, Kentucky, and they work just as well for its 1796 farm on the city outskirts.
Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington is only a half hour away by horse trailer.
The paint color is Benjamin Moore's Mystic Lake.
This house was built about forty-four years before the land that became Kentucky Horse Park even saw its first horses.
That was also right around the time that the prevalent log cabins of the area were joined by large brick and stone houses, even though Paris didn't have its own brick kiln until 1808.
This house features the best of both construction choices.
The living room and adjacent tack room showcase Paris' history and horses...
while the newer addition kitchen is all about hospitality:
The master bedroom is down the hallway from it, and sports the same soaring, reclaimed wood ceilings.
It's a beautiful space, but if it were mine, I'd use the colors of the old boards as inspiration for decorating, like this:
The spacious master bath has a dresser-turned-vanity and a copper basin sink.
Paris is in Bourbon County, and even though it's on the Bourbon Trail, that's apparently just a coincidence. Like Paris, Bourbon is another name given in tribute to the French.
Rounding out the first floor are the family room, powder bathroom and laundry room:
Upstairs are two more bedrooms. The house has three bathrooms and is 2,705 square feet.
Just for fun I paired this bedroom with an inspiration design from another horse barn:
This bedroom, though, gets paired with a design that's actually from a lakehouse.
The inspiration rooms go well with the existing second floor bathroom's design:
It was clearly influenced by the view just outside its window.
Luckily, the goat yard is a little further away. 😀
We've covered how well the house embodies horses and hospitality. Now for a tiny bit more history. Paris was just becoming Paris when this house was built in 1796. The town had been known as Hopewell until 1790 when the name was changed to Paris to acknowledge the help from the French during the Revolutionary War.
Meanwhile, Johnston's Inn, the oldest house in Bourbon County, was still only a teenager. It was built in 1782 for the stagecoaches running between Maysville and Lexington.
I couldn't find anything about this particular property until I matched it with an 1877 atlas. It's difficult to know exactly, but it may have been part of the land belonging to J. Berry. There are two J. Berry possibilities: the Joel Stribling Berry family, or the Johnson Berry family, but it's all conjecture.
{1877 atlas}
Paris is in Bourbon County, and even though it's on the Bourbon Trail, that's apparently just a coincidence. Like Paris, Bourbon is another name given in tribute to the French.
{source}
So we have horses, hospitality and history. What else besides the house combines the best of all three? Kentucky Bourbon.
The listing is here.
