This historic home in Norfolk, Virginia, is the Willoughby–Baylor House, right in front of you. Built about 1794 by William Willoughby (1758–1800), a local merchant and building contractor, this two-story, three-bay, brick detached townhouse still reads as a late 18th-century house. Its gable roof gives the silhouette common to that period, while the Greek Revival doorway and porch, added in the mid-1820s, announce a later taste.
Look closely at the porch: it is supported on two pairs of Greek Doric order columns, a deliberate architectural gesture from those 1820s alterations. The house was important enough to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971, and for years it opened its doors as a historic house museum operated by the Chrysler Museum of Art until it closed in 2020. As you stand here now, you can imagine the layers of history—an 18th-century merchant’s home with 19th-century classical updates—that meet in its brickwork and doorway.
Your eye can study the gable roof, the brick bays, and the Doric columns that wrap this house.