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Welcome to Laurie and Scott McCord’s dining room, situated in the former kitchen and slave quarters of their Lancaster property, Saratoga. Built around 1820, the out building had become a repository for rusty tools, gardening supplies, and other people’s discards when they bought Saratoga in 2009 and began living there full-time in 2013.
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Scott and Laurie McCord, along with their dog Baxter, welcome friends and family to Saratoga.
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When the McCords entertain, a chalkboard with the evening’s menu hangs just outside the dining room.
As views from the dining room table go, this one is sublime. Through the double doors is a panorama of 125-year-old sycamore trees surrounded on three sides by fields of corn and wheat nodding in the breeze.
Welcome to Laurie and Scott McCord’s dining room, situated in the former kitchen and slave quarters of their Lancaster property, Saratoga. Built around 1820, the out building had become a repository for rusty tools, gardening supplies, and other people’s discards when they bought Saratoga in 2009 and began living there full-time in 2013.
With the house’s dining room converted to a family room, the McCords were left to eat all their meals at the breakfast table. By 2015, Laurie McCord was envisioning a bigger space for dinner parties and holiday meals with family.
By October, renovation of the building had transformed it with a large, custom-made, wooden table seating ten, a collection of vintage chairs tied together by identical, cream, seat cushions and an enormous wooden chandelier found in Mexico and hung above rustic tree trunk beams.
Originally, a staircase led to the sleeping loft, but that’s gone, replaced by an opening made to accommodate double doors. “That was our only compromise, cutting that hole,” McCord says. “Function won out over form that time.” When they entertain, a chalkboard with the evening’s menu hangs just outside.
The original vertical plank door remains intact, impossibly short and not plumb—“I said nope, don’t straighten anything”—as do the original windows, including the small, hinged one on the second floor that once provided a bit of breeze on hot summer nights. The back sides of loft floorboards were used on interior walls, the paint color mimicking that of the aged and dirty boards when McCord first saw them.
Folk art portraits of George Washington fill the walls and an 1876 reproduction
of a Revolutionary War soldier’s jacket hangs on a chair in front of a secretary, the shelves of which are lined with wine glasses. Next to pieces of pottery and stone excavated from the foundation, a wood-burning stove sits on a hearth made from bricks reclaimed from the building’s original wall-to-wall fireplace.
“Those finds speak to the previous lives that have touched this old house,” McCord says. These days, it’s her family who’s celebrating the holidays here, while dinner parties begin with cocktails in the main house before moving to the new dining room.
“It’s always kind of unexpected when people first come in here,” she says, smiling. “I will never stop loving this place.”