Hope Butterworth’s house on Merrimack Street in Concord was unconventional.

Here she raised her three kids with a darkroom occupying one bathroom where she developed film and a picnic table serving as the dining room table. Next to it, a stereo played records on loop during dinners.

“From inside the house we didn’t even know how unusual our mother was and we didn’t know how unusual the life we were living with her was,” said Warren Zanes, the youngest of Butterworth’s three kids. “It was just a lifestyle that without question affected all of us in different ways.”

Butterworth died on Mother’s Day in May. She was 87. This weekend, friends and family will gather at St. Paul’s Church to remember their friend, community member, mother and grandmother.

To her children, Butterworth could be as stern as her father, a West Point army veteran, or as free-spirited as the hippies she grew up with in the 1960s. She was an artist – looking to constantly document the moment, putting a camera in her kid’s faces or printing unusual film streaked with light from her plastic Diana cameras.

To the Concord community, Butterworth’s name is most synonymous with the Friendly Kitchen. She could be found in church basements cooking meals in the early days, and eventually helped the nonprofit purchase their original house on Montgomery Street in 1999 with her husband Harry.

“Her story was a Concord story,” said her daughter Julie Zanes. “She was really a community person.”

When her children went away to school, they’d often come back to their mother doing shifts at “the kitchen.” With the Montgomery Street house serving dinner seven days a week, with weekend breakfasts and afternoon snacks, this quickly became a permanent fixture in all of their lives.

“It marked a shift where you would come home and it wasn’t like you might be going into the Friendly Kitchen, it was more that you would be going into the Friendly Kitchen,” said Warren. “It just became this centerpiece in my mother’s life.”

In 2004, the Friendly Kitchen named the Montgomery Street building “Hope House” to honor Butterworth and celebrate the milestone of paying off their mortgage 10 years ahead of schedule.

This house burned down years later and the kitchen moved to their current location on Commercial Street.

But outside of her work at the kitchen, the one thing that Dan Zanes, the oldest of the three, keeps coming back to when thinking of his mother’s legacy is her house on Stickney Hill Road.

“She was deeply, deeply connected to people on Stickney Hill Road and the land. She was connected to the fields behind the house, she was connected to the barn,” he said. “That was so much of her, so much of her artistry – the way she lived her life in that environment and she loved it.”

She lived there for 50 years, building a whole world for herself within a few-mile radius. It was here she met Harry, who delivered milk to her house and she later married. It was here she set up a drum set in the barn for her two sons to play music together.

“Her world was Concord and Hopkinton and within that world, there was an incredible cast of characters,” he said. “All the emotion and all the wonder that life has to offer was in that world. She stayed in a small area and went very, very deep.”

It’s no coincidence that all three of her children pursued careers in the arts. They had their mother as inspiration, as a road map to leading creative, intrepid lives.

“She was valiant,” said Julie. “I’m proud of her. I think she was a really good artist… She was hard-working, she knew how to engage people and enlist people in the effort.”

On Stickney Hill, an apple tree sat on the edge of a field on her property. There, Butterworth’s family shared many meals at the table.

“Getting everybody there for a meal was as good as anything,” said Warren.

With that in mind, her family and friends will gather Saturday to celebrate her life and legacy. One question drove their planning – “What would Hope want?”

“She would definitely want people laughing, she would definitely want people singing, people eating together,” said Warren. “That was easy.”

A memorial will take place Saturday, July 13 at 2 p.m. at St. Paul’s Church, 21 Centre St. in Concord.