A Grand House, Restored
Renovation took Lewes home down to its bones, then brought it back
By Lynn R. Parks | Photographs by Carolyn Watson
From the September 2023 issue
At first, Kristi Webb fell in love with Lewes. She had taken a break from work and was spending the weekend in the bayside town. “I was by myself, I didn’t know anybody,” she recalls. “I was sitting on the patio at Kindle [a downtown restaurant], watching families walk by, and I thought, ‘This is it.’”
She and her husband, Earl, had been looking for a home to which they could retire; he was working in Dallas for the Bank of Montreal, and she was president and CEO of Element Fleet Management, based in Toronto. They had thought that Rehoboth Beach was where they wanted to live. But after her evening on the Kindle patio, Kristi called the real estate agent they had been working with and asked to be shown available houses in Lewes.
After being swept off her feet by the First Town in the First State, she fell in love with the backyard of a home on Gills Neck Road. “Not the house, at all,” Kristi clarifies. The centuries-old structure had suffered a fire in 2007 and had not recovered well. But the backyard was spacious and quiet, and home to several mature trees, including a holly, a cedar and a grove of figs.
Despite the yard, “we were really reluctant to even go in the house,” Kristi says. “But we eventually did, and then we connected with [Lewes architectural designer] Brenda Jones, who helped us to see a vision for the house.”
She and Earl bought the property in 2015. And now, in addition to Lewes and her backyard, Kristi loves what she calls their “forever home.”
Before deciding on a path forward, the couple spent a year getting to know their new house. “We were still working, but we came here to visit,” Kristi says. “We had one room of furniture, enough that we could sleep here and get a feel for the place. We wanted to see how the house sounded, and what the light was like.”
Renovation started in December 2016 and was completed 2½ years later. Workers stripped the house back to its “bones,” Earl says, exposing beams and studs. The contractor was Dewson Construction, which has offices in Rehoboth Beach and Wilmington. Besides Jones, also helping were designer Richard Scott of J. Conn Scott Furniture (with locations in Selbyville and Rehoboth Beach) and Colleen Simpson, an interior designer with Wayne Simpson Architect, based in Kennett Square, Pa.
The layout of the front part of the house, dating to the late 1700s, is as it was when built, with a room on either side of a central hall and stairway. To keep the hall from looking like a bowling alley, Kristi says, workers put paneling on the walls and, toward the back of the hall, a parquet floor and barrel ceiling.
Both of the front rooms have coffered ceilings. In the library, on the south side of the hallway, the rectangles in the coffer are covered in gold foil. “It gives the room a nice glow,” Kristi says.
On the opposite side of the hallway is the living room. An exposed-brick chimney in the center of the north wall had been completely covered over by drywall and plaster. Workers demolishing the wall were surprised to find it, Kristi says.
Behind the living room is the kitchen. An antique French fire plate, inscribed with the date 1667, is mounted over the La Cornue stove; the plate is surrounded by Dutch tiles from the 1500s and 1600s that the Webbs collected.
The dining room, in what was a side porch, still has a slanted ceiling typical of a porch. An 18th-century table from France is narrow, only about 2½ feet across. “We love that table because conversation around it is very close,” Kristi says.
Separated from the dining room by a wall of glass is the wine room, kept at a constant 55 degrees. The room and its wine racks are made from wood and bricks salvaged from elsewhere in the house.
The family room, where hangs an 1850 map of Delaware, is at the back of the house. Beyond it is a screened porch, and behind that, the backyard that Kristi and Earl first loved. In clearing out overgrowth, they found a birdbath, a small statue, a bench and an urn, all of which are still there.
Looking through an album of photos taken during her home’s renovation, Kristi says that the structure is worthy of all the work they put into it. “Think how long she has been here, and how she suffered,” she says. “I think that she deserved to be grand. And she is.”