Duck's Cottage Coffee & Books

Duck's Cottage occupies a building that dates to 1921, when New York investors built it as the Powder Ridge Gun Club — a hunting cottage that remains, by the shop's own account, the only hunt club ever built in the town of Duck, and one of its oldest surviving structures. The original layout held three bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen with an attached porch, a shared living-dining room and a screened front porch, plus outbuildings for guides and a boathouse. Its last private resident, known locally as 'Duck' Braithwaite, became a local fixture for sunset gatherings on the property with his wife, Betty.

In 2002, childhood friends John Power and Allen LeHew converted the cottage into a coffee-and-bookshop, bringing in Jamie Anderson to run the book side from the start. LeHew ran the espresso machine for nearly two decades before retiring to the mountains and selling the business to Anderson in 2023 — a handoff that kept the shop within its founding circle rather than passing to an outside buyer.

Today the shop, at 1240 Duck Road in the Waterfront Shops on Currituck Sound, pairs a curated stock of bestsellers and Outer Banks-specific titles with coffee poured by a barista staff whose combined experience the shop puts at more than 114 years — depth unusual for a shop of its size.