Three O’Clock Dinner at the John Blake House

WHEN JOHN BLAKE began building his L-shaped house in the late eighteenth century, it sat on the southernmost point of the peninsula that is downtown Charleston. As a successful shipping broker and president of the Bank of South Carolina, Blake entertained in the more formal, second-floor drawing room, where it was cooler and from where he and his guests could look out over the marsh or down into his fashionable, high-walled parterre. The frame house is an unusual variation of the traditional Charleston single house, and, per Georgian custom, is built on a high raised stucco basement. The double piazzas were added in the nineteenth century, long after Blake’s death.