Nordic by Northeast

Dwell • November-December 2021

Brendan Ravenhill likes to describe his summers in Maine as half vacation, half working meditation.

A Stylish Blend

Decor Maine • October 2021

Jorge Lizardi gets two syllables into the word “compromise” before he corrects himself. “Compromise” isn’t the word he wants to describe what happened when he and his partner, Justin Henry, refurbished their second home.

Contemporary Camp

Decor Maine • October 2020

Initially, Vaughn And Christine Clark weren’t even sure they planned to sleep in the house they were hoping to build on Round Pond in Greenwood. They already had a ski house in town, across from one of Mount Abram’s chairlifts.

Harmony Through Contrast

Decor Maine • August 2020

The current ubiquity of zoom has The Brady Bunch, and its opening grid, very much on people’s minds. In that TV show, the then-modern appear-ance of the blended family’s home was entirely uniform: seventies suburban, down to the sunken living room and avocado-green refrigerator.

Soulful Solar

Decor Maine • March 2020

My own bad case of climate grief, the new term for those angst-ing about the fate of the planet, prompted me to action last fall. Out with my behemoth oil tank and in with heat pumps and solar panels.

The Gathering Place

Decor Maine • November-December 2019

If it’s winter, and it’s Wednesday, there’s a good chance Tim Harrington is busily texting his siblings and his friend and frequent business partner, Kevin Lord, with some pressing questions: “What are we going to eat this weekend? What are we going to do?”

Three’s Company

Dwell • November-December 2019

The first thing you notice upon arriving at Julie and Scott Pelletier’s house outside Portland, Maine, is what you don’t see: a front door. There isn’t one. Which doesn’t mean you can’t figure out how to enter.

Special Focus: Kitchen & Bath Design

New England Home • September-October 2019

Function and form make a beautiful marriage in these five spaces by New England designers.

Family Friendly

Next • Fall 2019

High-Performance, low maintenance ideas for a family- friendly home.

Scandinavian-Inspired Retreat

Dwell+ • August 2019

In Englishman Bay, where his relatives have summered since the 19th century, a musician builds an idyllic hideaway for his family and their three parrots. “When I was growing up, we went to a little log cabin in Maine,” says a musician now based in Colorado.” It sounds romantic, but it really was three boys stuck in a one-room cabin with a loft.

Like Mother, Like Son

New England Home Connecticut • Summer 2019

If you’ve ever sold Girl Scout cookies or hoped people would support your charity run, you’re no stranger to hitting up those close to you for money. In 2015, a Long Island woman asked her son to help fund a small pollinator garden for her retirement community. In the happy way of certain good ideas, the request inspired a second eco-friendly project.

Hidden Potential

New England Home Cape & Islands • Summer 2019

Around town, peo – ple called it Casa Bacardi. Once a single-family house, it had become a Provincetown rental. Young “brand ambassadors” for Bacardi rum were regular sum – mertime tenants.

Childhood Redux

New England Home • May – June 2019

Picture a pack of little girls and boys spending their summer biking around Mount Desert Island in Maine. It’s the ’80s, before we’re all scared about letting our children run free for the day, and these kids have an impressive to-do list. On the agenda: searching for sea glass, painting wooden fish at a local artist’s studio, and pedaling into Northeast Harbor.

Working the Angles

Dwell • May – June 2019

When writer Susan Orlean was posting pictures of her new home on Facebook earlier this year, she received rapturous replies of the “Gorgeous!” and “When can I come visit?” variety. Under an image of her bedroom, showing a rough stoneand-cement fireplace, a trapezoidal window, slanted walls, and a tongueand-groove ceiling, one friend wrote, “It looks like high modernist meets Fred Flintstone.” Another friend asked, “Is that a Schindler?”

A Container for Art

Decor Maine • May 2019

You might not expect a South African native whose work for NGOs and the United Nations has taken her most often to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia to move into a late-1970s, mid-Maine passive solar house. But that is exactly what the owner of this Camden house did. The attraction? Her parents, who live in a property across the road.

The Nature of Things

New England Home • March – April 2019

“We can never have enough of nature,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden. A truism, even apparently when we are inside. Blessed with a beautiful piece of land, architects and interior designers often say they “want to bring the outside in” or they “don’t want to compete with the views.”

A town house of one’s own

Decor Maine • October 2018

We both grew up in communes,” says Kavi Montanaro. His wife, Arielle Saiber, spent her preteen years in a New York ashram and her teen years in an ashram in India, as her mother and stepfather were interested in yoga and meditation. Montanaro lived with his parents, five siblings, and 20 mimes at Celebration Barn in South Paris, the horse barn turned theater with dormitories for per – formers that his father (renowned mime Tony Montanaro) founded in 1972.

Tied to the Ocean

Decor Maine • October 2018

Some houses seem more fated for their owners than others. So it was with Doug and Nancy Lashley’s home in West Bath. An Annapolis, Maryland–based couple, they had looked at 55 properties during a three-year search for a Maine property.

The House of the Four Gables

New England Home • September – October 2018

If you want to stand—or sleep, or eat homemade granola—at the crossroads of American literary and revolutionary history, there’s probably no better place to do it than the Hawthorne Inn in Concord, Massachusetts. The bed-and-breakfast sits on former farmland owned in turn by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. These literary lights didn’t build, however.

The Lake Effect

Maine Homes • Fall 2018

When she was a girl, going to the coast was “a big darn deal” for the owner of this cottage. She grew up in a hardworking, rural community near Bangor, and her family could not afford trips to the ocean. Now based in Texas with three grown children of her own, she and her family spend summers in Camden, where the “big darn deal” can be a daily pleasure.

Vintage Modern Loft

Decor Maine • September 2018

A life of adventure and a life with a mortgage. Somehow, they do not seem one and the same. For 50-plus years, Mike Keon opted for the former. He worked as a graphic designer, chimney sweep, fisherman, and restaurateur while living in Boston’s North End, South End, Chinatown, and other neighborhoods, as well as on boats off New Bedford, Seattle, and (for a decade) Alaska.

Rough Diamond

Down East • August 2018

While clearing bittersweet off their 4.4-acre property on Portland’s Great Diamond Island, Kathryn Adamchick and Bruce LaPierre kept finding pieces of rusted and corrugated metal in a stone field. They weren’t entirely surprised. Their land had once been quarried for rock and gravel, and it was part of the site of Fort McKinley, a former army base constructed between 1890 and 1910.

Partners in Design

Maine Home+Design • August 2018

I had never heard of a Deck House until recently; then, all of a sudden, Deck Houses seemed to be popping up everywhere in my life. The first time, I was visiting a Portland architect at her Westbrook home, a post and beam with a wide, glassy gable end that faces the street. She wasn’t sure, but she suspected she’d purchased a Deck House.

Refined Cottage

Maine Home+Design • July 2018

Who doesn’t want to know which doctors other doctors see for care? Or which lawyers other lawyers consult? Who do the experts choose, when the experts are the customers?

An Element of Grandness

Maine Home+Design • July 2018

Joanna Bennett and Brian Grassby were debating between two houses in Kennebunk: one that didn’t exist and one that did. Architect Brian Beaudette had designed the house that didn’t yet exist, and Crystal Wilson and Shawn Douston at Douston Construction had priced out the building costs. Even so, Beaudette and Wilson were rooting for the house that did exist—the “Pink House,” nicknamed for the pink of its interior furnishings and the pinkybrown paint and rosy trim of its exterior.

Contemporizing the Vernacular

Maine Home+Design • June 2018

We’re lawyers, so we both always have opinions on things,” says Carmita Alonso of herself and her husband, Ed Estrada. They and their sons, however, were in complete agreement about buying a house on Moody Beach in Wells. They already had a home there, but not one on the beach.

A Twenty-First-Century Saltwater Farmhouse

Maine Home+Design • May 2018

Builder, architect, interior designer, and landscape architect—they all have the same thing to say about Melissa Rizzieri: she knows what she likes. “Oh,” Melissa worries, “I must have been a pain.” On the contrary, the team that worked with her and her husband, Jerry, on the Kennebunkport house they built in 2016 adored the process.

Returning Home

Maine Home+Design • April 2018

A brutally cold winter and a late oil delivery—one plus the other equals bad news, and in January 2014, that bad news fell on the ears of Richard Lane of R.A. Lane Construction. He received a handful of phone calls from people who noticed a giant slick of water—or what some described as an expanding iceberg—in front of Elmwood Farm, the Camden property owned by artist Amy Lowry, who at the time commuted between Chicago and Maine. Lane knew the house with its ell and attached barn well.

New Life

Maine Home+Design • April 2018

The retired lawyer’s license plate reads Aftermath. Ditto the stone plaque on the column marking the drive to the home he and his physician wife own in Kennebunk (in addition to primary residences in Wellesley, Massachusetts, near where she practices, and Naples, Florida). Customarily suggesting a time after troubles, “aftermath” also refers to the second growth that appears on a mown field.

Fits to a “T”

Maine Home+Design • March 2018

John seemed half-embarrassed as he sat with his wife, Sally, in Kaplan Thompson Architects’ office in Portland, talking about a piece of land that he and Sally had recently bought in Harpswell. “He had all these sketches with him,” says architect Jesse Thompson. “He had been thinking about their house a lot.

Master of Blue

Maine Home+Design • February 2018

What would you do if I told you I had fallen in love with a color?” writes author Maggie Nelson at the start of her quirky book Bluets. Part emotional memoir and part philosophical inquiry, the slim volume published in 2009 is a meditation on the color that, studies show, people favor over every other. On the coast, blue is also the go-to color of designers who want to bring the outside in.

Putting the Horse Before the House

Maine Home+Design • January 2018

The drive to Nick and Sarah Armentrout’s recently renovated nineteenth-century farmhouse in Lyman takes one down a lovely road, past forest, through pastures, and over a stream. Though the road dead-ends at their house, most people who make the trip aren’t going there for a social call. They are bringing their children or themselves or someone with disabilities to ride a horse. They are not headed for the house but for the barns, arenas, and outbuildings of the Armentrouts’ business, Carlisle Academy Integrative Equine Therapy and Sports.

Two Houses in One

Maine Home+Design • December 2017

In 1943, when Catharine Rollins Holmes and Herbert Shepard Holmes bought an 1885 summer cottage on the tip of Mere Point in Brunswick, the official paperwork said that the “lot and creators thereon shall never be used for keeping a hotel, boarding house, saloon, or other place of public entertainment.” These conditions were (happily) not honored, according to a history of Mere Point from 1878 to 2003, but that claim is half tonguein-cheek. While there was never a business on the property, the family did like to entertain.

Built for the Beach

Maine Home+Design • November 2017

For the bulk of their professional lives, Paul and Judy Jusseaume owned an ambulance service in Marlborough, Massachusetts. They were accustomed to the stress that comes with a fraught, 24/7 job devoted to emergencies. Judy was all the more accustomed, because she grew up around the business, her father having started it.

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

Maine Home+Design • October 2017

When I first emailed Harald Prins to get the street address of his house in North Bath, he sent back a message describing how I might arrive by canoe, if I happened to be coming from the old Abenaki village at the mouth of the Sebasticook. Then he tacked on a quick street address, in case GPS was my chosen method of navigation. This, it turns out, is how an anthropologist jokes, especially if he is an anthropologist who has spent his life—as has his wife, journalist and author Bunny McBride—with indigenous people around the globe.

A Tale of Two Houses

Maine Home+Design • September 2017

When Louise Jean was growing up in Lewiston, summer weekends were all about getting to the water. Her family regularly went to lakes, but Old Orchard was the “real treat” of the season, she says, what with the amusement rides and the beach. Life took Louise far from the beach, however.

Old World in the new

Maine Home+Design • August 2017

John and Mary Mills seem as much comedy team as retirees as they talk about their new home in Kennebunk. The story starts with a run. “In the summertime, I am a jogger, not a runner,” John says. “I slog along.” On one such jaunt, on a lovely late August day three years ago, John decided to go farther than usual and run down Parsons Beach Road.

Simplicity & Ease

Maine Home+Design • July 2017

For years, Jennifer and Jeff Seaver had been thinking, in a casual way, of buying a house at Higgins Beach. Jeff had visited the Scarborough community of tightly packed beachfront cottages since he was a boy. “Every summer,” he says, “it was the destination vacation, a special place for my brothers and me.” When Jeff married, the tradition continued with his own children summering on the coastal stretch popular with year-round surfers, sunbathers, strollers, and those curious about the ship’s ribs visible at low tide, evidence of an 1897 wreck.

Back in the Neighborhood

Maine Home+Design • May 2017

Miami-based Tim Harrington is an active developer responsible for multiple luxury hotels, restaurants, a gym/health center, and other properties, new and developing, in the Kennebunks and Biddeford. He’s been busy on the home front, too, having renovated eight houses in the 29 years that he’s lived off and on in the Kennebunks. In 2013, when I visited the 1880s post-and-beam he’d renovated on the mouth of the Kennebunk River, he told me he was done, at least when it came to his own abodes.

Sparking Joy

Maine Home+Design • April 2017

Kate Stapleton* was very clear about her hopes for her Portland condominium: “I want it to be like The Jetsons.” Not that Anne Orr of And/Or Design of Youngstown, New York, believed her. “I had to clarify it with her about five times before we proceeded,” Orr says.

Norwegian Transplants

Maine Home+Design • April 2017

If they didn’t like Maine, they could go home. That was the deal that Ingunn and Torgrim Joergensen made with their children when the family left their home on an island south of Oslo in Norway. They were coming to the United States because of Torgrim’s work as an electrical engineer with a defense industry group that was setting up an office in Biddeford.

All for the Lake

Maine Home+Design • March 2017

There was a problem with the Maine camp that Andy and Karen Coppola bought in the fall of 2012. It didn’t feel like a Maine camp. Yes, the lightly forested land was bordered by a meadow and a beautiful lake, reportedly one of the three cleanest in the state, and, yes, the water has surprisingly and deliciously balmy temperatures
for swimming.

Old Friends, New Design

Maine Home+Design • Febuary 2017

In 2007 a Cumberland couple was visiting the Inn at Ocean’s Edge in Lincolnville. Waiting for their restaurant table, they wandered about, checking out the grounds and admiring the transitional style of the decor, how the neutrals and blues flowed from space to space. “I love everything about this place,” the wife of the pair said to the bartender when they returned to the downstairs bar.

Home for the Holidays

Maine Home+Design • January 2017

For years, the phrase “home for the holidays” has had a slightly different meaning for interior designer Debra Villeneuve than for most people. She always wants family to come to her place for celebrations, only these days, “her place” is in Houston, and her children and her fiancé’s children live in New England. Given this, it never made sense to ask everybody to travel to Texas, where she relocated for a job in 2001 after years of living in Falmouth.

California Modern

Maine Home+Design • December 2016

Before they moved to Maine, Brannon and Mandy Fisher lived in an Eichler home in San Rafael, California. “You lived in an Eichler home?” exclaims Rob Whitten of Whitten Architects in Portland. It’s been three years since principal architect Whitten and project architect Eric Laszlo collaborated on the Fishers’ Maine home; however, they hadn’t known this bit of the homeowners’ history.

Neighborhood Art Project

Maine Home+Design • October 2016

For years, painter MJ Blanchette and writer Brian Cox lived next to a dilapidated home on Kittery Point, and they were pretty happy with the situation. The structure— likely built in the 1700s and once owned by a famous sea captain—was overrun with animals and collapsing in on itself. Still, the couple relished the privacy that the adjoining property gave them.

Past Perfect

Maine Home+Design • August 2016

It’s hard to imagine Eliot Elisofon ever took a vacation. The wildly productive, socially conscious photojournalist was also a war photographer, longtime Life staffer, painter, filmmaker, and author. He traveled the world, working tirelessly and often in harrowing conditions.

Stories to Tell

Maine Home+Design • July 2016

Houses always have stories to tell: stories about who lives there, who once lived there, and what the objects and arrangement of rooms, past and present, signify. Even so, the house of retired lawyer Thom Sacco and interior designer Will Tanner seems unusually chatty. Or maybe it’s only that their home has a lot to convey: two and a half centuries of history, plus a present incarnation overwhelmingly rich with antiques, design aplomb, and horticultural pleasures.

Of a Peace

Maine Home+Design • July 2016

Technically, the couple at the center of this story first saw their house in Wayne online. After that, they had a more poetic encounter: they paddled by in a kayak and saw not the house — which was hidden by trees like all the homes around Wilson Pond—but loons, ospreys, and an old cabin. Later, after they had bought the property, they heard stories.

The Little House that Could

Maine Home+Design • June 2016

In 2013 Hope Hill took her daughter and friends to Mount Desert Island (MDI) for a post-high-school-graduation celebration. It wasn’t an unusual destination for Hill. She and her siblings have been going to the island since they were children.

Warm Welcome

Maine Home+Design • May 2016

Rust Hills, the late fiction editor of Esquire, used to say that the first line of a short story should introduce the themes of the work to come. The same might be said of a home’s front door: it should invite you in, while establishing the nature of what is inside. Perhaps this is more ideal than realistic, but it is an ideal achieved in a couple’s 2013 Kennebunkport home.

Marin’s Maine

Maine Home+Design • April 2016

Norma Marin first saw Cape Split on Bastille Day in 1955. “I arrived around two o’clock,” she recalls. “It was breezing up, and there was a shimmer on the water.”

Lean, Serene, and Green

Maine Home+Design • March 2016

When Ellen Walsh and her maritime-lawyer husband, Nico, decided to downsize from the Yarmouth home in which they’d raised their three children, she thought, “Here is an opportunity to put into practice what I’ve been teaching for years.” Currently an elementary school science teacher in Falmouth, Ellen has been involved in environmental education since the 1980s. She and her husband, both ardent naturalists, wanted their new home to be eco-friendly.

Design Among Friends

Maine Home+Design • February 2016

When interior designer Deborah Chatfield was a girl, she spent summers at her grandparents’ house in Pittsburgh. A typical day found her with the children next door: scrambling around the neighborhood’s abandoned estate (once owned by the Mellon family), playing Capture the Flag, or visiting the drugstore for candy. When her grandparents
moved away, the tradition ended.

The New Vintage

Maine Home+Design • January 2016

As someone lucky enough to have been an overnight guest at some beautiful summer homes, I know my job: bring gifts. Maybe wine, or a pie from Two Fat Cats in Portland, or a ginger molasses cake from Rosemont in Yarmouth. Something, at any rate, to accompany the evening meal.

Relaxed Luxury

Maine Home+Design • December 2015

I grew up in a neighborhood of modest colonials and split-levels. Back then, in the ’60s and ’70s, it seemed clear to me that my neighbors in the split-levels had gotten the short end of the suburban housing stick. They were fun houses with a downstairs that usually felt like a playroom, but there wasn’t much light down there, and the upstairs felt full of spaces—the formal living room and dining room—that no one ever used.

Refined Rustic

Maine Home+Design • November 2015

How better to think about acquiring a ski house than to go skiing? That’s what the husband of a Massachusetts couple did when he was looking to build a house in Sunday River. He skied down into the property for sale, thought it looked like a nice spot, and skied out, thereby taking a first trip down and up the hill that would come to occupy his winter weekends for years to come.

Space, Land & Vistas

Maine Home+Design • October 2015

Being in the CIA makes you long for space. At least, it made Jeff Vreeland long for space. Of his 26 years with the Directorate of Operations, he spent 16 overseas.

Moody Hues

Maine Home+Design • October 2015

One day, a developer friend called Steve Oraham and Jim Samson at their Miami Beach home to say he’d found a “great house in Cape Porpoise and you’re really dumb if you don’t buy it”—a bit of exhortation that was a joke (in its putdown) but earnest enough. “He was probably sick of us staying in his house,” Samson opines. More joking.

Eclectic Farmhouse

Maine Home+Design • September 2015

Don Purdy had been in Kennebunk for less than a day when he decided to buy a house. Actually, it was more like five minutes. From the start, the area felt “familiar to me,” he says, which might be a surprise, given that Purdy spends most of the year in the Bahamas, on Harbour Island, where he owns and runs Rock House, a boutique hotel frequented by celebrity clients such as Jack Nicholson and Elle Macpherson.

Fab Prefab

Maine Home+Design • August 2015

Bigger is not, of course, always better, and that awareness was very much in Dayne Lamb and Gardner Stratton’s minds when they thought about building a home in Maine. Showy new mansion? Old-school grand “cottage”? No, not for them.

Happy House

Maine Home+Design • July 2015

At first, the woman who commissioned this contemporary farmhouse in Camden had only a general idea of her hopes for her house. She was pregnant, so she knew she wanted a good family place, something that would work for a child from infancy on.

All in Bloom

Maine Home+Design • June 2015

I like a good cause that gives me a chance to explore, and that’s just what the Cape Elizabeth Garden Tour is: an opportunity to wander through some of the town’s prettiest privately maintained gardens. There’s no invitation required, just a $20 to $25 ticket that benefits the Arboretum at Fort Williams Park.

Design Maestros

Maine Home+Design • May 2015

First story: Washington, D.C., resident Sherry Turner finds herself a newly divorced woman with a 14-month-old child and a desire to create traditions for her son. She and her ex make a plan. He will take their son for Christmas, she for Thanksgiving.

Generations Joined

Maine Home+Design • March 2015

I associate dilapidated bungalows with wooded back roads that lead to the waterfront. There might be nothing particularly pretty about the homes, but they speak of summer pleasures: blueberry picking, eating lunch in a damp bathing suit, and hiking through the woods.

Once More to the Beach

Maine Home+Design • February 2015

“We returned summer after summer,” E.B. White writes of a beloved Maine lakeside retreat where he was taken as a child. In his later adulthood, he famously moved to Maine from New York City. Good-bye to all that.

Assembling the Past

Maine Home+Design • December 2014

Scott Benezra is a whiz with Craigslist. Worthless deals begone. He has an eye, a knack, a gift. Hard work? Luck? A cyber sixth sense? When he and his wife, Karen, were building a home in Kennebunk, Scott’s Craigslist sleuthing led him to a massive 100-year-old soapstone sink, a soaking tub that usually sells for $10,000, Italian stone flooring, and a Wolf stove from one seller and matching hood from another seller.

Mountain Magic

Maine Home+Design • November 2014

“Welcome to La Casa Roja,” says the chalkboard in the mudroom of Charise and Ken Gainey’s Sunday River home. A picture of two mountains and a smiling face accompany the greeting. The artwork is by Bella Gainey, aged 10.

Learning on the Mountain and Off

Maine Home+Design • November 2014

It’s a bitterly cold winter day, and Madison Hertzog and Stephen Dexter, seniors at Gould Academy, are showing me around campus. It’s an odd day to tour the Bethel prep school, and not just because of the brutal weather.

Boldly Modern

Maine Home+Design • September 2014

Heraclitus said you can’t step into the same river twice, and it would seem that you can’t design the same house twice. A house isn’t always moving, like a river, but in general, when it is complete, it is complete.

Rustic Update

Maine Home+Design • September 2014

Say “cedar log cabin” and the first thing that pops into my mind is Smokey the Bear, standing by his forest domicile. In my imagination, it’s a Lincoln Log–type home with a cave-like interior, perfect for a creature who might want a pot of honey.

Design is in the Details

Maine Home+Design • August 2014

Here’s a word you don’t hear applied to much new construction in Maine: Rockefellerian. It’s how interior designer Tracy Davis of Portland’s Urban Dwellings describes the Southport home that Knickerbocker Group of Boothbay and Portland built for Paul Coulombe, the former CEO of White Rock Distilleries.

American Vernacular, American Contemporary

Maine Home+Design • July 2014

Such is the nature of Linda Banks’s work that she is not often at Simply Home, the Falmouth home furnishings and accessories store that she established to showcase her design ideas. But on a day in 2010 when a Rochester-area couple stopped by, she happened to be in a back room, celebrating her finance manager’s birthday.

Garden by the Sea

Maine Home+Design • June 2014

Carlton and Joan Plummer’s garden in East Boothbay is a showstopper. Built on multiple levels, on land with an abrupt 100-foot vertical drop to the sea, it consists of 19 distinct gardens, half a mile of stone walls, staircases, a bridge, a man-made dry river bed, bluestone walkways, wood-chip pathways, a lily pond, a large vegetable garden, berry bushes, an orchard of dwarf fruit trees, a solarium, and a potting shed, all integrated with the natural forest.

Vintage Tourism

Maine Home+Design • May 2014

If you’re an American of a certain age—the age that lived rather than watched Mad Men—you may associate childhood summer vacations with a packed station wagon, an endless drive, a brief stop for fried clams at Howard Johnson’s, and eventually the arrival at a motor lodge.

Family Heirloom in Kennebunk

Maine Home+Design • May 2014

Since 1660, there has been an inn on one end of Gooch’s Beach in Kennebunk. Since 1756, that establishment has been the Seaside Inn, run by the Gooch family and their descendants.

North Haven Archive

Maine Home+Design • April 2014

Does everyone on the island of North Haven know David Hopkins? “Oh, yes, my God, yes,” Hopkins says. If you had asked the question of his father or his great-grandfather, they might have answered similarly. Hopkins estimates that he is related to two-thirds of the approximately 340 people who live year-round on North Haven.

Building a Creative Community

Maine Home+Design • April 2014

From the start, Sandy Weisman—a collage artist, bookmaker, and poet—conceived her retirement home as an artist’s retreat. And not just for herself. In 2010 she purchased three acres of an old sheep farm in South Thomaston from a longtime friend.

Industrial Chic

Maine Home+Design • March 2014

Free verse or formal: this is your choice as a poet. If you are a poet of space, as architects and designers must be, the choice is normally made for you. Working with few restrictions? Wonderful. Working with many, perhaps tricky, rules and requirements? That can be difficult, but sometimes constraints present a pleasing challenge: What can we do with what we have to work with?

New Found Farm

Maine Home+Design • March 2014

As a girl, I liked to imagine how I’d live in an unlikely place. It might be a clearing in the woods (I’d bury a metal box in the ground for food) or the upstairs bathroom (I’d put my sleeping bag in the tub, my cereal boxes on the shelf). Todd Bennett and Sue Mendleson’s home in Washington is the same kind of fantasy, writ large and improved by talent and ambition.

Cosmopolitan Cottage

Maine Home+Design • February 2014

Real estate developer and hotelier Tim Harrington is responsible, with his business partners, for nine upscale hotels and inns in the Kennebunk area. Their properties include luxury bungalows in the woods; bright, chic rooms at Goose Rocks Beach; a New England inn; and elegant, European-style accommodations: Hidden Pond, the Tides Beach Club, the Kennebunkport Inn, and the Grand Hotel respectively.

Getting to Know the Land

Maine Home+Design • January 2014

One might reasonably expect a startling design to start with a startling design idea, but “Pondicherry,” as the owners call their downeast home, started with walking. A lot of walking.

Cape Porpoise Pied-à-Terre

Maine Home+Design • January 2014

My early morning fun,” says Marianne Hovivian, “is to put on my sneakers and walk the neighborhood.” In the summer of 2011 the neighborhood she was exploring wasn’t in Manhattan, where she and her husband Ted live, or in Brooklyn, where they have turned an industrial building (the location of their former furniture business) into condominiums, but in the coastal village of Cape Porpoise, part of the town of Kennebunkport.

A Three-Dimensional Puzzle

Maine Home+Design • December 2013

Maybe it was his mind reading, or a talent for description. Maybe it was both. In 2011 and 2012, when a Connecticut couple were building a home on East Penobscot Bay, they got in the habit of frequently updating their architect, Eric A. Chase, on what they wanted. “We’d present a design or lifestyle idea,” the husband remembers, and Chase would sketch the request on whatever came to hand: a napkin, an envelope back, a piece of paper. “Like this?” he’d ask. The answer was inevitably yes, he’d drawn exactly what they were imagining.

Healthy Home

Maine Home+Design • September 2013

At 42, Jason Peacock looks like you might expect an avid surfer who built a solar house almost entirely by himself might look. Handsome, lean, and fit with a day or two of stubble on his face, he is simultaneously laid-back and passionate.

Streamlined Space

Maine Home+Design • August 2013

What movies do actors watch, what books do writers read, what clothes do fashion designers wear? I always want the inside scoop. So when I was offered a chance to visit Kevin Thomas’s house, I jumped at it. Thomas is the publisher of Maine Home+Design (as well as Maine magazine), and from 2003 to 2010 he built high-end custom houses under the auspices of what is now Thomas and Lord in Kennebunkport.

A Sequence of Surprises

Maine Home+Design • July 2013

When Rose and Ron Dennis first sat down with A4 Architects in Bar Harbor, they had a few things they wanted to make clear. “We’re fussy,” said Ron Dennis, owner of Bangor’s Dennis Paper and Food Service. “We are difficult, and we are a pain.”

Sustainable Style

Maine Home+Design • June 2013

Much about Bruce and Kate Snyder’s current house can be explained by the fact that they once had three dogs. That is to say, they once were the sort of people on whom landlords don’t look kindly. In 2010 they planned to move to Portland from Washington, D.C., but they couldn’t find anyone willing to rent to them because of their pets.

Earthy Chic

Maine Home+Design • May 2013

Siblings Brad King and Cynthia King-Guffey are family oriented. Very family oriented. But they don’t live near each other.

Cottage by the Sea

Maine Home+Design • May 2013

Cape Porpoise resident Ed Sullivan wasn’t thinking of taking on a project when he learned that the house across the street from his was for sale. He wasn’t interested in the house exactly, but he did long for what came with it: a bayside fish house and a spectacular view of the harbor.

Art in Its Place

Maine Home+Design • April 2013

Ed and Betsy Cohen weren’t planning on meeting Suzette McAvoy when they visited Castine in the summer of 2008. But when they bumped into her at Dennett’s Wharf, they approached her with a proposition. They intended to build a serious collection of work by contemporary Maine artists and wanted to know if McAvoy could help.

Dreamy Days at Wooster Farm

Maine Home+Design • April 2013

Can a sunny day be more enjoyable than a sunny day in a Frank W. Benson painting? Somehow it doesn’t seem so. The turn-of-the-century American impressionist made a career of depicting sporting scenes, wildfowl, and members of high society, but he is best known for his portraits of his family at Wooster Farm, his summer home on the island of North Haven.

Mid-Century Modern

Maine Home+Design • March 2013

Hip, streamlined, and functional, midcentury modern furniture was a postwar solution to a perennial problem. Where should we sit? Where should we eat? Rejecting ornamentation and other addons, the designers of the period opted for practical, organically shaped furniture fabricated with new materials like fiberglass, molded plywood, cast aluminum, and plastic.

Simple Lines and Bright Spaces

Maine Home+Design • March 2013

In the fall of 1998, Kenna Haines—an artist who goes by Kendra Ferguson in her professional life—came to Maine to see a good friend. When the two went out for a walk, Haines mused about where she would locate herself next in life.

Classic With a Twist

Maine Home+Design • February 2013

Interior designers have to begin somewhere. James Light starts with the least obvious room in the house.

His and Hers Houses

Maine Home+Design • December 2012

In 2007, architect Sam Van Dam visited the Francis Loeb Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He had some new clients—a Boston couple who intended to build on an island in Penobscot Bay—and Van Dam wanted to use the library’s collection to discern their tastes.

Lakeside Refuge

Maine Home+Design • November 2012

Architect Pierre Vial says that when he first conceived of his lakeside home (opening spread) he had “the idea of a big roof that would be very protective and wide and would give the character of the house.” He imagined a place “where you would feel protected and cozy.”

Happy Home

Maine Home+Design • October 2012

Photographer Winky Lewis and physician Alex Millspaugh were in the midst of a home renovation—a dumpster in their front yard, mess all around—when a beautiful elderly woman stopped on the sidewalk and said, “I used to live here.”

Stonington Shingle

Maine Home+Design • October 2012

Their careers have taken Michele Janin and Tom Linebarger around the country and around the world. They’ve lived in California, Indiana, Minnesota, New York, England, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The one geographic constant in their lives? Maine.

Stone Fantasy

Maine Home+Design • July 2012

South Song is the Southport summer home of a philanthropic Houston couple. It is also a castle. Or, better said, an Italian villa. No, a Gatsby-esque estate. It depends on who is doing the talking.

Cottage Classic

Maine Home+Design • July 2012

There’s a nor’easter on the day that I visit Mike and Katie Emmons’s home on Higgins Beach. The tide is high, the house built just against the seawall, and when I shiver through the front door, I start.

Coastal Contemporary

Maine Home+Design • June 2012

For almost 25 years, Wendy and Ed Case had a cottage-style summer home in Kennebunkport. Their place wasn’t on the water, but it was close enough. They could walk down the road, cross a street, traverse a right-of-way, and find themselves, within minutes, at Goose Rocks Beach.

Hospitable Home

Maine Home+Design • May 2012

When people say they want a home that’s good for entertaining, they often mean they want a comfortable living room, a kitchen that’s easy to work in, and a dining room that seats eight or more.

A House of Many Visions

Maine Home+Design • March 2012

An additional design-builder on a house that has already had two prominent architects? Normally the end result would be a muddle, the consequence of too many thoughts about   where things should be going.

Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn

Maine Home+Design • January/February 2012

Looking at artist Laurie Hadlock’s semi-abstract landscape paintings, one’s first impression is of blue. Blue in its most exuberant and expressive forms. Blue in all its shades: cerulean, cobalt, ultramarine, Prussian.

A Marriage of Styles

Maine Home+Design • October 2011

Remarrying later in life presents a quandary. Where to live? Your place or my place? One Boston-area couple resolved this question for their primary home (the wife’s place prevailed) but found that a former saltwater farm in Scarborough offered a new possibility: our place.

A Fairy Tale Estate

Maine Home+Design • September 2011

When the couple who own this Bar Harbor home share their address, people sometimes say, “Oh, I’ve slept there.” When they first consulted a local architect about renovating, the architect wasn’t inclined to help. He thought the house was fine as it was.

Shipshape on the Shore

Maine Home+Design • August 2011

In 1974, a Florida businessman bought what he describes as “a typical Maine cottage: two bedrooms, a living room, and a little porch.” The house, located in Northport on West Penobscot Bay, was appealing for its shore-hugging location.

Victorian Charm

Maine Home+Design • July 2011

It isn’t often that grand homes in established Maine summer communities come onto the market. At least, it didn’t seem so in the late 1990s to one couple who frequently vacationed in the state. In their experience, such places were handed down from generation to generation, rarely leaving a family.

East Meets West

Maine Home+Design • June 2011

Interior designer Jeffrey Doherty fell in love with New England in the early 2000s. At the time, he lived in California, but he was working on a large interior-design project in Boston and on Nantucket. A friend told him, “If you like New England, you’ll love Maine.”

Falmouth Flyer

Maine Home+Design • March 2011

For orthodontist Jeanne McDonald, architecture is a lot like dentistry. “It’s artistic but a little mechanical,” she says.

Life Inside the Lightbox

Maine Home+Design • January/February 2011

One day in 1999, Madelon and Gene LeBlanc called their son Michael with news. They had been in Bridgton, Maine, for the weekend and bought three acres of land with the intention of building a retirement home there.

Nestled in Newry

Maine Home+Design • January/February 2011

Fred and Donna Trudo have skied all over the world. They have hit major slopes in Switzerland, France, Spain, Austria, Andorra, and South America. But it was on a trip in Montana—to Moonlight Basin near Big Sky—that they saw a ski house that gave them the inspiration to pursue their own dream home.

Maine Art, Maine Color

Maine Home+Design • September 2010

To get to their summer home, Connie and Arthur Batson of Falmouth pack up the car and drive all of 36 miles to Kennebunk. It might seem strange to vacation so near one’s winter home, but for sixty years the Batsons have been summering at Kennebunk Beach.

Modern Craftsman

Maine Home+Design • September 2010

We used to vacation on the Outer Banks,” says the husband in the Virginia couple who own this Sebago Lake home. “But then it occurred to me that I hate hot weather. Why do I go to a hot place for vacation?”

Total Transformation

Maine Home+Design • July 2010

For several years now, Ted Andrews of Harborside Design in Freeport and Christine Maclin of Maclin Design in Portland have been collaborating on the incremental renovation of a house near the tip of Bailey Island. Can you badmouth a house? The Bailey Island home had at least one surprising detractor: the current homeowner, who wasn’t particularly fond of the house when she and her husband bought it.

Rockport Victorian

Maine Home+Design • July 2010

If you are, in large part, responsible for your village’s economy, you might well expect to have the grandest house around. Limestone baron H. L. Shepherd did.

Bold Stewardship

Maine Home+Design • June 2010

Two strange things happened to Stephanie Mayer on the day in 2005 when she first took possession of Portlaw, her Camden home.

Standing Grand

Maine Home+Design • May 2010

Stone Gables is the name of an English Tudor-style home perched on a granite ledge in Cape Elizabeth. As perhaps befits a windswept, ocean-side property with such a name, the house has a bit of the feel of the manor and comes complete with, if not a sweeping saga, an interesting history.

Seaside Sophistication

Maine Home+Design • March 2010

Ken Schiano remembers Mary Ann Carey first approaching QA13 Architects, the Bangor firm that he and his wife Paula Beall run, with a peculiar request.

Long Distance Design

Maine Home+Design • March 2010

Camden is full of transplants, people who fell in love with Maine on vacation and bought property with the hope of summering then retiring on the coast. The Chicago couple who decided to renovate an 1880 New England–style home on Chestnut Street, near Penobscot Bay, are no different in that.

Fireplace Artistry

Maine Home+Design • January/February 2010

When it comes to heating a room, fi replaces aren’t always the most efficient option, but then there’s not much romance to snuggling under a blanket by the wood stove, even less in sipping wine around the monitor heater.

New on Mere Point

Maine Home+Design • November/December 2009

The story of the home at Mere Point begins like this: Some years ago, a homeowner built a garage with a second-floor apartment on a particularly nice piece of property, filled with meadows and forest, with commanding views of the still waters of Mere Point Bay, just west of the Harpswells.

The Moss Manse: Taking John Calvin Stevens to Boothbay

Maine Home+Design • September 2009

When it comes to her own home, realtor Connie Moss has something of a set design approach to real estate.

Now We’re Cooking!

Maine Home+Design • May 2009

Being the winner of the “Ugly Kitchen” contest seems like an unfortunate honor. Right up there with starring in the Shag Carpet Follies or landing in the Lawn Ornament Hall of Fame.

A Beacon of Green Design

Maine Home+Design • March 2009

How green can you go?