The house, in Hopkinton, is framed by granite gateposts. The yard has not yet been landscaped.

The Providence Journal / Bob Breidenbach

Richard Prescott’s family house is a small, 19th-century building with hand-hewn exposed beams. He and his wife, Terry, didn’t want to tear it down, so they built a new structure around it, incorporating the old part into the design.

The Providence Journal / Bob Breidenbach

Richard and Terry Prescott’s house on Woodville Road in rural Hopkinton is deceiving. From the street, the yellow house with the barn-red front door looks like a modest-sized Cape-style house, possibly built about the same time as the old stone walls surrounding the property.

On the inside, almost everything is new, from the large cook’s dream of a kitchen, to the roomy bathrooms, to the sparkling windows.

But the new rooms were constructed around and above the historic center of the house, a former blacksmith shop built about 1840. What was once the shop is now the Prescotts’ living room, a sunny space with exposed beams and wainscoting.

The appealing mix of old and new is what the Prescotts were aiming for in their restoration/expansion project. Richard Prescott’s parents bought the house in 1964, when he was a college student, and its history, as well as its proximity to the Wood River, which is literally in the backyard, is important to him.

“I’ve always loved the property,” said Prescott, who is a social worker. He remembers taking children for canoe rides on the river when he was a volunteer with the VISTA program. “I always had hopes of making it my home.”

Prescott said a man named Lodowick Church bought the property in 1833, and built the blacksmith shop in 1840. Several years later he sold it to his son, Aaron Church, who then rented the property to local factory workers.

“It was never a mansion, which is one of the things I liked about it,” Prescott said.

The Prescotts hired an architect, John Patrick Walsh, of Westerly, who himself has a love of historic architecture, to design the plans. Walsh first met with the Prescotts in the fall of 2003, but the design work didn’t start until the following spring. Construction began late last year and was recently completed. Walsh said some of the first decisions involved which elements of the house should stay and which should go.

“The Prescotts, they were interested in taking the time to think about what we were doing,” Walsh said. “That was why the process took the time it did.”

For the Prescotts, an important priority was to “try to keep as much of the original 1840s blacksmith shop as we could,” even though it “wasn’t the most structurally sound portion of the house,” Walsh said. Three different additions that had been put on over the years were removed, including the entire upstairs of the house.

“There [were] just too many additions … [and] none of them made any sense,” said Steve Burdick, owner of Burdick’s Remodeling and Renovation, of Stonington, Conn. Burdick was the contractor for the project.

Retaining the oldest section of the house had a practical value, in addition to its historical and sentimental value for the Prescotts. If the entire house had been razed, as older houses so often are in “teardown” projects, local zoning laws would have required any new house to be built farther away from the street, Walsh said. And building a new house so close to the Wood River would have opened a Pandora’s Box of legal, environmental and construction issues, he said.

Also, “it was a request of Dick and Terry to respect the historic integrity of the area,” Walsh said.

Walsh’s design retained the small, quaint look of the old house but increased the square footage from 1,600 to 2,700.

The showpiece of the new construction was the kitchen, which has two open sitting areas in view. The space is large and airy, with windows facing the river, massive amounts of storage in the white beadboard cabinets, and granite countertops.

Every room in the back of the house was designed to take full advantage of the water views.

Walsh said that, because of the very high water table at the site, a full basement was not practical. “We went as deep as we could and we gave them an oversized crawl space,” he said. The property has a private well and a new septic system.

The old stone foundation was shored up, which involved tearing up most of the floorboards in the old blacksmith shop, Burdick said. In “one of the unfortunate losses, a beautiful old chimney and fireplace had to go,” Walsh said. “We were forced to rebuild the entire thing.”

“We couldn’t do anything with the chimney,” Burdick agreed. “The building inspector said, ‘Knock it to the ground and start over.’ ”

Richard Prescott said he sifted the soil that was exposed under the living room during the foundation work, and found marbles and arrowheads. Some of the marbles were the “swirl” type that date from the late 1800s, he said. And he remembers his mother found arrowheads on the property at different times over the years.

Materials that could be salvaged were reused, and old doors and wainscoting from some of the rooms that were removed are in the new rooms.

Walsh said he and Burdick have worked together many times before.

“He’s a ‘can-do’ kind of guy,” Walsh said of Burdick. “When you’re opening up old projects you never know what you’re going to find. He did a great job.”

The Prescotts plan to move into the house next week. The smell of fresh paint still hangs in the rooms. Richard Prescott, who has an interest in landscaping, is starting to think about how he will design the area outside the house. Their son Joshua, an artist, was at the house recently and canoed down the river with a friend.

Terry Prescott, a homemaker, has already begun to hang curtains and has brought over a new lamp and put new glasses in the kitchen. “All of our new stuff is here,” she said.

The Prescotts said the construction cost of their custom project was $350,000, not counting architectural fees and engineering fees for the new septic system.

Richard Prescott said that on the day he gave Burdick the final check, he found a “copper large cent,” a penny that is about the size of a 50-cent piece, on the property. The coin was minted in 1844, the year Aaron Church bought the property from his father.