Built by and for a successful carpenter-builder from Rhode Island, this is among the city’s most celebrated buildings both for its design and its role in preservation history. Sitting on the innermost tything lot (closest to Habersham Street) and facing the square, the three-story red brick Federal-style house features a wide, arched front door surround, one full story above the street, accessed by a curved double stair. Paired tall brick chimneys bracket the standing-seam metal roof, which is punctuated by prominent dormer windows. The central-hall plan features an arched columnar screen framing an elegant oval stair, as well as exquisite craftsmanship showcasing Davenport’s talents as a builder. In 1955 a group of seven women saved the building from demolition, founding at the same time the Historic Savannah Foundation (HSF). Following an initial restoration, which eliminated features added during its longtime use as a boarding house, the Davenport House was opened to the public in 1963; it also served as the HSF headquarters for many years. An early-twentieth-century brick two-story apartment building that filled most of the rear yard was demolished in 1973. Although the original house had no formal garden, the Trustees’ Garden Club commissioned the side and rear garden, designed in 1975 by Paumier of Land Design/Research in the manner of antebellum gardens of coastal Georgia. The plantings were modified in 1998 by British landscape designer Penelope Hobhouse. Across the square at 321 E. York Street is the current HSF headquarters, which occupies the former Abraham Sheftall House (1818; 2000 restored), a building that was aggrandized with the addition of a full-height raised basement and accompanying covered high stoop after being moved from its humbler original location facing Jefferson Street in Elbert Ward in 1968 when that neighborhood was being razed to make way for the construction of the Civic Center (5.14).