Most mornings, Jonathan Hutchins can be found peeling back pieces of plywood or assembling the parts of a new wall. He alternates between wearing the hats of a coffee brewer and a carpenter as he readies the interior of his new William & Sons Coffee Co. location to open in downtown Penacook by summer.
Layers of history coat every surface of the Village Street storefront, which used to house the bakery Kaye Place. Paneling from different eras lines the textured walls, soon to be painted the signature rich coffee-brown hue of every William & Sons location.
Dark paint hides everything, Hutchins jokes as he surveys the space. He only began chipping away at renovations a month ago, and already a pristine black granite bar presides over the large room and a wall separates the main space from the kitchen.
“When I go somewhere, I like to learn everything about every little tile in the place and who is here,” Hutchins said. “And that helps me. It motivates me in the whole process of grabbing an old building and trying to preserve as much as that I can, but not being a person that is qualified in that.”
His dad, William, the namesake of the coffee brand, was the true carpenter. Hutchins picked up a lot from him along the way. And now he’s transmitting it to his nephews Jed and Peter, who have been helping with the Penacook project.
“I’ve never done this without having some core people alongside me to knock it out, because they’re great,” he said.
This will be the fourth location he’s opened in four years. Hutchins, who first launched William & Sons in Brazil, where he and his wife spent 15 years, will now have two locations in Concord and two in Manchester.
The Penacook spot took him by surprise. He’d had his eyes on the small village downtown for a few years but had channelled his energy into making the Washington Street location in Concord a vibrant hub for people to gather, while simultaneously opening a shop on Elm Street in Manchester. When Kaye Place closed, Hutchins seized the opportunity to grow, even purchasing the former bakery’s equipment to kick off the endeavor.
“Penacook is the pathway right now in progress, I think. It’s growing,” said Hutchins, who lives in nearby Loudon.
The shop, located at 324 Village Street, used to be a pharmacy that served soda and ice cream before it was Kaye Place, he said. The more time he spends there unearthing the original ceilings and installing equipment, the more he learns about the space’s history.
When he pictured how he’d spend this spring, he imagined growing his coffee education efforts in Concord, as “the next level of maturity of my shops.”
“We talked about this before, doing tasting events, talking about coffee, writing about coffee, and now I’m like, doing construction again,” he said with a smile and a glance around the store.
Hutchins started getting to know people in Penacook by helping out at the Living Hope Community Church, and he loves the folks he’s met so far. Beyond that, he saw a need for a coffee shop and sought to fill it.
“[It’s] kind of being a part of the ground-breaking moment of this little town’s development, and I call it almost like revitalization,” he said.
Mayor Byron Champlin, who lives near the Washington Street location, described it as a “high-energy neighborhood gathering spot.”
“I think that William and Sons represents a really important step in the major step in reinvigorating downtown Penacook Village, because there’s nothing like a good coffee shop, a gathering place to generate foot traffic, to generate activity and energy in a downtown,” he said.
In the past few years, both Warren Street Architects and Strings & Things Music have relocated from their former Concord spots to the village. Last summer, Sweet Dreamz opened inside part of Fox Hardware, bringing soft-serve to the small downtown.
The Canal Street Riverfront Park, which opened in 2025, has provided an additional green space in the area, with walkways, a pavilion and an amphitheatre for people to spend time along the banks of the Contoocook River. New housing along Fisherville Road and at Penacook Landing, the site of the former Allied Leather tannery, has attracted more residents to the village.
Brianna Uzdanovich, who has lived in Penacook her whole life, has seen the area change drastically in the past few decades.
“It’s gotten so much bigger, with all of these different apartments and living and housing and everything. I mean, there’s so many pieces of land that I remember were just woods, and now they’re homes and apartment buildings and stores and stuff,” she said.
The Merchants Way project at Exit 17 recently brought a grocery store to Penacook, along with several stores, an urgent care clinic and some eateries. Residents had been wanting a grocery store for years, said Ward 1 City Councilor Brent Todd, who has lived in Penacook for two decades.
“It’s created a lot more traffic, and it’s really helped, I think, promote our traditional downtown areas in Penacook, which is great,” said Todd.
Still, he believes the village would benefit from a longer-term plan, something he and others at the Penacook Village Association are working towards, in part thanks to a partnership with the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension’s Community Business Engagement Program. They’re in the midst of collecting data, which will then allow Penacook to better plan for its future.
Concord’s master plan rewrite will also factor in resident perspectives on Penacook, which will aid in planning for the coming decades, Todd said.
“Penacook, in the last several decades, has gone through a lot of dramatic changes,” he said. “Penacook traditionally has been for many, many, many years an industrial center and a real center of activity. And now that those industries have died out and left, the question now becomes: What is Penacook’s next step? How do we want to identify ourselves?”
William & Sons is contributing to this forward momentum, with each new piece building on the previous one, said Todd.
“People that would normally have to go somewhere else if they want to pick up a morning cup of coffee somewhere,” he said, “well, now they can come into Penacook, and then they can look across the street and say, ‘Oh, you know that reminds me. I need a new hammer. Let me go into the hardware store.'”
Uzdanovich appreciates the arrival of another local business — something “homegrown” rather than a chain, she said.
“My hope is that it can be kind of an established place for people to meet, for people to go, people to work, if need be,” she said. “And I would love to just see it grow. Something that has always kind of been instilled in me is kind of keeping that small hometown feel for sure. But I would love to see more small businesses go in and see our local economy grow from it.”
As Hutchins and his nephews continue chipping away at the remaining renovations, he’s aiming to open by the end of May. Like all his other locations, the Penacook shop will have that same cozy living room feeling that draws people inside.
“They’re as much excited as we are to be a part of the first coffee shop in a long time in Penacook,” he said of the people he’s met so far, some of whom have already sent in resumes to work there. “So we’re excited about that, and just serving the community.”
