a place for PROMISES

DENNIS AND KAYLA WHITE of Lynchburg, Tennessee, had long wanted to start their own business. “I’m a credit analyst, so I work with numbers all day,” Kayla says. “But that is so not me! I think of myself as a creative person, and I love design. When this house came up at auction in October of 2018, we thought it would be a chance for us to launch a venture of our own, and for me to do the work I love.” The house is a two-storey, 3800-square-foot I-house with Greek Revival influences. It was built in 1858 for Townsend Port Green, a lumber dealer and wealthy landowner. In this handsome manse, he and his wife, Mary Ann Landiss, raised 14 children. The family fortune declined after the Civil War; in the early 1880s, Green sold the house to local whiskey merchant Daniel S. Evans.

- REGINA COLE

What’s an I-house?

First identified by researchers in the 1930s as common in Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa (thus the name), the I-house is a vernacular form, not a style, which may be plain or embellished. Essentially, it is a two-storey, single-pile (one room deep) house with a tall, narrow silhouette. The façade is usually symmetrical. It is most prevalent in the Mid-Atlantic and South.

Evans put his own permanent mark on the house around 1888, when he hired “plain painter” Fred Swanton to decorate the south parlor with seven landscape scenes.

“The Green–Evans House is a local landmark,” Kayla White says. Still, when the house was on the auction block, the Whites were the only ones to bid on it: “We paid about half of the appraisal value.”