22 Milk Street
New England Home • May – June 2019
When Ariana Fischer moved from midcoast Maine to Portland in 2009, she brought her three children and her interior design practice with her, but closed G.F. MacGregor, her stylish home decor boutique in Rockland. Now, the shop is back, with a different name—22 Milk Street—but a similarly central location, in Portland’s historic Old Port (and just across the street from Fischer’s interior design studio, making it easy for her to move back and forth between businesses.) In a corner space, 22 Milk Street offers the unique goods that Fischer has been identifying—and, in the case of furniture like an upholstered bed frame, a contemporary turned-leg sofa, and a leather easy chair, designing—for clients for years.
Urban Legends
New England Home Rise • Spring 2019
“People who don’t need a lot of space and want to live downtown where things are happening” occupy the forty-eight micro-lofts (225 to 800 square feet) that encircle the second and third floors of The Arcade Providence’s atrium. Once the nation’s first enclosed shopping mall, the 1828 Greek Revival–style building has groundfloor shopping and dining, including New Harvest, “a great local coffee roaster.” arcadeprovidence.com
Personal Touch
New England Home Connecticut • Winter 2019
The furniture that architect David D. Harlan and interior designer A. Defne Veral design could not be more personal. Sometimes traditional, sometimes modern, the pieces are always created for a particular space and need. A friend wants a dining room table for her apartment?
Family Everywhere You Go
Old Port Magazine • August 2018
I am on the phone, getting set to describe myself to lobsterman Jonathan Norton. We are meeting tomorrow on Long Island, and I’m thinking he’ll want to know what I look like when he fetches me from the ferry. My go-to joke is forming in my mouth—“I’m middle-aged, tall, with naturally messy hair”—when Jonathan says, “No need.
Into the 21st-Century
Old Port Magazine • June/July 2018
Leslie Hart and Kevin Schochat wanted to get out of the 1800s and into the twentyfirst century. They rent an apartment in a pre-Civil War building in New York’s Soho neighborhood and Hart used to own a fivebedroom 1840s house in the Hudson Valley region. They were ready to retire and hoped to relocate to a sophisticated city that offered country pleasures.
SoPo Style
Old Port Magazine • May 2018
In 2015, Margaret and Joe Ybarra’s search for their first home was featured on HGTV’s House Hunters. Watching the Ybarras reconcile their wishes and bank account, one is less likely to think, “Wow, they are going to find their dream house” than, “Wow, what a dream couple.” They sweetly debate location and amenities while making clear that they love their chosen city of Portland, and each other to boot.
Character & Soul
Old Port Magazine • April 2018
Soon after architect Jessie Carroll moved to Portland in 2012, she went looking for a multi-family investment property. She figured she’d rent one apartment for income, live in the other, and be able to walk to her job with Whitten Architects, whose office is on the peninsula. A year and a half (and several failed offers) later, she was still looking.
Perfect Match
Old Port Magazine • March 2018
Seven years ago, Anna Ginn was in Maine to ski with a group of Freeport friends who nicknamed themselves the Mamas, because they’d raised their children together. She’d arrived early from New York City, where she worked as the managing director of a philanthropic network focused on global poverty. With her free time, Ginn headed over to the Maine Island Trail Association’s (MITA) Portland office to visit her niece, only to find she was out sick.
Made Here
Old Port Magazine • January 2018
For all that it is traveled now by locals and tourists, Portland’s Commercial Street came somewhat late in the mapping of the Portland peninsula. In the 1850s infill reconfigured the harbor to add a street broad enough for horses and buggies, and to unload cargo from ships and freight cars. The street was named for its function: Commercial.
Hillside Story
Old Port Magazine • May 2017
Fred Williams has gotten used to vertical living. For most of his many years in the Portland area, Williams lived in conventionally configured spaces—a passive-solar house he built in Gray, a condo on Chandlers Wharf in Portland, and a townhouse in North Deering. Now he lives in a five-story townhouse, one of 29 units in Munjoy Heights, an eco-friendly, passive-solar project developed by Redfern Properties, built by Wright-Ryan Construction, and designed by Ryan Senatore Architecture.
Exuberant Zen
Old Port Magazine • April 2017
Before Alex Fisher met his wife, Brianne, he was an aficionado of pop art. He collected old advertisements, computer games, and pinball machines. “There were lots of lights and color,” Alex says of his home decor.
Kitchen with a View
Old Port Magazine • March 2017
Last summer when the hydrangeas were dressed in their best colors for the final days of summer, John Golden, a real estate broker and food writer with careers in Maine and New York, held a party in his tenth-floor apartment. This was at Back Bay Tower, a 16-story building in Bayside, where Golden rented a three-bedroom apartment with a great room and galley kitchen. Before that he owned a Georgian colonial in the West End, and before that a pied-à-terre on Chandlers Wharf.
Portland Pied-à-Terre
Old Port Magazine • January/February 2017
In decades past, people didn’t come to Maine for its urban charms, The shorefront, the mountains, the lakes—those were the draws. But with Portland booming, Kathy Meyer and Harvey Yaverbaum, who live in rural Connecticut, appreciate Maine for its city life. The couple has a blended family, which includes Yaverbaum’s youngest child—a former preschool teacher who lives in North Yarmouth with her telecommuting husband and two children–and Meyer’s older son—a physician with Maine Medical Center, who lives in South Freeport with his interior designer wife and two children.