The Hancock Inn will be back before the Historic District Commission Oct. 10 after no verdict was reached Tuesday night due to a proposed metal fence on the property.

Boston-based purchased the inn, located at 33 Main St., from Jarvis and Marcia Coffin in April of 2022. Since its purchase, the new ownership group has made a series of renovations, including raising the front deck for ramp accessibility. Plans called for the building to reopen this summer, but that was pushed back due to weather complications and the remaining renovations.

According to Mark Fernald, the attorney for 33 Main Street Realty Group LLC, the new metal fence would be the first step in establishing a garden behind the structure.

“I think there’s one piece that I goes from the corner of the inn over to the sideline that is in roughly the right spot than the rest of it. A hundred or more feet of it is in the wrong place. The owners of the inn would like a bigger backyard garden,” said Fernald. “Part of the area they want to be garden is currently gravel and they want to turn it into a nice garden. So the old fence looks really bad and it’s in the wrong place.”

The design team involved in the project brought testimony from the Hancock landscape architectural historian to the prior hearing on the issue in June, according to Fernald.

“It isn’t meant to be you know, a big decorative element. The landscape architectural historian testified a few months ago before the Historic District Commission,” said Fernald. “The idea is to have a fence that will blend into the landscaping and not call attention to itself because it’s not a dense construction. You know, it’s mostly air spindles pretty far apart. And it’s painted black so it doesn’t shout out the way a white picket fence with. That’s been the design objective to have a fence that doesn’t speak much at all.”

Fernald stated that in June, they were asked to bring a fence sample similar to that by the Guernsey Building in Peterborough.

“What we brought last night was an attempt to respond to that suggestion from the Historic District Commission from the June meeting. What we brought last night didn’t have a curly filigree; it had something a little more attractive, something a little more interesting than the very plain thing we brought two months ago,” said Fernald. “But they didn’t like it. And maybe we should have brought more options last night, but the frustrating part was the comments from the town and also some comments from the commission that they really don’t want any metal fence at all. And so we were thinking, ‘Then why did we bring a metal fence?’ ”

Nancy Macalaster, chair of the Historic District Committee, could not be reached for comment.