Find out all about this week’s featured home

Berkshire Hathaway Realtors Lucia Johnstone and Henri Gourd recently introduced a special North Stonington home to the market. It comes with a lot of potential and flexibility for a luxury-market buyer. The property combines four parcels of land— two adjacent lots, each with single-family homes, and across the street, two contiguous lots of woodlands—for a total 80.10 acres.

The main house, known to the owners as “Pentways,” dates back to the Colonial period, circa 1780. It presides over 38.81 acres, with an address at 255 Wyassup Road. It sits back behind a long, 2,000-foot stretch of frontage on the road, delineated by antique stone walls.

A second shingle-style home—known as “La Boite” and built in 1989—occupies the adjacent 7.72-acre parcel. It has an openplan living room, dining room and kitchen, with two bedrooms, a full bath and a deck.

The Realtors believe the main house’s footprint remains the same as it was originally constructed, while other improvements have been made to the house over the course of centuries—including by the current owners, who recently put on a new cedar-shake roof. In fact, much of the original architectural character has been preciously preserved, evident in both the exterior and the 2,848 square feet of interior space.

“It’s got a lot of the original features— that is to say, wide-plank floorboards and

exposed beams,” Gourd said.

Welcome Home spoke by video conference with Gourd, Johnstone and Helen Bearn Pennoyer, who owns—and is selling—the property with her brother. It has been in their family for approximately 68 years.

“My father was a scientist, and my mother was a lawyer. They found it by drawing a 150-mile circle around Manhattan on a map, and the line went through Stonington,” Pennoyer recalled. “My mother had been to Stonington once to visit a high school friend, and they just happened on this house, but at that time, there was no heat and only one bathroom.”

Today, the house has six bedrooms, two bathrooms and zoned heating.

Over the years, they improved the house, traveling to North Stonington as a family in the summers and for holidays. Friends and guests would visit, too.

“We’d spend every Thanksgiving here. My father always invited everyone he worked with at the lab, so we’d have loads of people from all over the world—people who got to experience Thanksgiving for the very first time,” Pennoyer said.

“We celebrated Christmas there, and went for weekends. Back then, we had just one neighbor, a farmer … so it felt like we were out in the middle of nowhere,” the co-owner recalled. “We’d spend a lot of time reading, building fairy houses in the forest, exploring and taking walks down to the pond to hunt for frogs. It was magical, especially for us city kids.”

The antique home was magical, too. She recalled being enchanted by the oversized fireplace in the living room. It’s one of two fireplaces.

The kitchen is a spacious room, with a vaulted, beamed ceiling, skylights and those gorgeous wide-planked wood floors with centuries of patina.

There’s an in-ground pool, a companion to the main house, but within an easy walk of both houses, if the property is ultimately used as a compound.

“My parents built the second house, initially as a place for our family and my children, but we have three children and it’s a two-bedroom house, so eventually, my parents moved in there, and the rest of us would stay at Pentways,” Pennoyer explained.

During COVID, the entire family came to stay at the compound. “It was a wonderful spot during COVID, because we had multiple generations of the family living here, and I think at any given time, we had eight computer stations going, with Zoom meetings all at the same time,” she marveled.

“In the summertime, the houses aren’t visible to one another,” Johnstone noted.

The two lots with the houses share their back borders with Pachaug State Forest. It has the distinction of being Connecticut’s largest state forest, with 26,477 acres to explore.

“There’s a pathway that leads you to a really nice pond,” Gourd said. “From there, you’ll find trails into the forest.”

The seller recalled how her parents planted thousands of perennial bulbs on the property, creating gardens around the house, while adding color and texture during the season.

There’s an antique barn on the property, as well, which could be leveraged for workshop or storage space. Should a buyer wish to keep horses or other livestock, the barn could be used as it was traditionally intended. Gourd also noticed that there’s about 2 acres of cleared fields for grazing or farming.

The Realtors also wanted earnest buyers to know that the owners had a professional pre-listing inspection performed, and the owners subsequently made some repairs. Realtors Johnstone and Gourd are hosting an open house at 255/261 Wyassup Road, North Stonington, this Saturday, September 30, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.