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Chuck Pennington Built This House Twice
Long before the chandeliers went up, 202 Nun Street was a burned-out shell that had sat empty for years. Chuck Pennington looked at it anyway, and saw a home instead of a ruin. If you've stayed with us before, his fingerprints are already familiar to you. If this is your first time here, welcome, because you're about to meet the man who built this house twice.
"Seriously? I am smiling inside." - Chuck
Chuck and his partner Dennis Madsen bought this house in 1995 for $245,000, back when it was better known as a fire-damaged boarding house than a bed and breakfast. They hauled out 10,000 pounds of old radiators and copper plumbing, 80,000 pounds of plaster, and rewired the whole place from scratch. Dennis, a commercial interior designer, ran the renovation while Chuck kept his job in Washington, D.C. to help pay for it. The Verandas opened its doors on Valentine's Day 1997, and within a few years, the rest of the block followed. Squatters gave way to neighbors. Seven empty, falling-down houses became homes again.
Chuck had a gift for finding beautiful things and an even bigger gift for sharing them. Czech crystal chandeliers, a twelve-seat dining table pulled from an old conference room in Mount Airy, a barn full of original Waterford crystal he talked someone out of for next to nothing. He filled the house with these finds the way he filled a room with people, generously and without much explanation. He hid dirty antique books on the coffee table just to see who'd notice first, brought Dilly Bars to the tourism office every summer, and kept people smiling for reasons they couldn't always explain. In 2022, the New Hanover County Tourism Development Authority gave him the Jane Peterson Tourism Legacy Award, and the carriage drivers downtown still like to joke that The Verandas is Second to Nun.
Nineteen years into running The Verandas with Dennis, Chuck became his caregiver as Alzheimer's took him piece by piece, until Dennis passed in 2014. Four years later, Hurricane Florence sent a tree through the sunroom, collapsed the chimney, and caved part of the roof. Chuck was 67, watching more than two decades of work undone. He rebuilt anyway, running fans and dehumidifiers for six weeks and putting the house back together over fourteen months. Years past when most people would have called it quits, Chuck did it all over again.
"You don't really own a place like this. You're just caretakers." — Chuck Pennington
A note from the Verandas family
When a decision feels bigger than it looks, we still ask ourselves, "What Chuck would do?" His standard is the one we keep: no detail too small, because a guest notices the care even when they can't quite name it. The chandeliers, the china, the crystal Chuck couldn't resist buying still fill these rooms, and so does the sense that whoever's staying here belongs.
That was always the whole point, and it still is.
In Chuck's Honor
In lieu of flowers, Chuck asked that gifts go to the Alzheimer's Association, or toward putting his own book, An Alzheimer's Caregiver Alphabet and More, into the hands of a caregiver who needs it.
Give to the Alzheimer's Association