When Zu Bakery in Portland’s West End opens at 9 a.m., it’s the pastries, warm from the oven, that are laid out first. By 11, says baker and owner Barak Olins, the pastries should be sold out, and in their place will be warm breads, which are replaced by pizza in the afternoon. As each new item comes out, the goods on the counter shift down toward the register. By the end of a day, 5 p.m., all that’s left are the wines that compose the wine station and the empty Softset Ceramics serving trays, made by Barak’s wife, Mimi.

The bakery, like the home that the Olinses built, is open, airy, and bathed in natural light. It’s “sparse, not minimalist,” says Mimi. The floors are all that remain of the previous tenant; everything else is new. New but also old. Salvaged wood-framed windows divide the bakery counter from the workstations; wooden dough troughs let off a stringent, heady funk of yeast; and a shiny metal grain mill sits in a closet-sized room. A reclaimed marble and soapstone counter, sourced by Alice Dunn at Portland Architectural Salvage, abuts the sideboard. Two transoms let light pass through interior walls, and old wooden peels—used to slide bread into and out of an oven—are mounted over the wall of windows. At the back of the bakery’s central room are the oven and oven loader. It’s a space built to serve the movement of the people using it, and an aesthetic that reflects a respect for site-specific use of space. In this case, the use is making and selling traditional French-style pastries and breads, as well as Irish scones and Italian biscotti, to the community. The fine instruments and the product are decoration enough.

You can see the same concept at work in Mimi’s ceramics: plates, bowls, cups, and trays that look a little like heavy canvas. Also like fabric, most pieces are joined by a seam. Some are softly stippled to give the surface a polka-dot relief. All bear the mark of the hands that made them. The work projects a distinct voice, though it’s a voice that also yields to function. Alone, the Softset serving tray is elegant; staged with tangerines, it’s a white frame for the fruit’s form.

Function informed the design of the house that the Olinses built, too. The three-story just a few streets away from the bakery has a modern exterior. It’s square and tall, with a sloping roof. The inside is spacious, with high ceilings and wide windows. They wanted “clean, cleanable, and uncluttered,” says Mimi. The ground floor is an open blend of kitchen, mudroom, and sitting room that, in the warmer months, extends into the backyard through a wall of triple-pane sliders connected at the corner by one nearly floor-to-ceiling window. The wall of glass was a splurge. Otherwise, their choices were economical, energy efficient, and adherent to the requirements of LEED certification (without going for the actual certification, which is expensive and would matter more to them if they were hoping to sell).

On the second floor is the “catch-all” room: it’s Barak’s office, but it’s also where the grandparents and guests stay; there is exercise equipment in the corner, and two walnut bookshelves made by Barak are weighted by an array of books (Living Bread, The Village Baker, Six Thousand Years of Bread, etc.). Across the hall are the kids’ rooms—they have two teenagers: a daughter, Talia, 15, and son, Emile, who’s 13.

On the third floor is Mimi’s studio, where light pours in through a picture window and a sliding glass door leads to a deck. After a sabbatical from Waynflete in 2019, where she taught art with an emphasis on pottery, Mimi began building a body of work that would become Softset. In 2020 she chose not to return to teaching and to remain in the studio in order to focus on ceramics full-time. Recently she was commissioned by the owners of one of Portland’s newest and most talked-about restaurants, Twelve, to create a line of dish ware—over 400 pieces. The shelves of her third-floor studio are stacked with ceramics. A kiln rests in the corner. Three tables fill the center of the room, where Mimi works slabs into vases, bowls, cups, and trays.

Their bedroom, just off the studio, features 14-foot-tall ceilings that seem to expand the footprint of the relatively modest space, and a long slender window pulls in more light. From the exterior, the window aligns with the front door. That was Chris, the architect, says Mimi, who used the windows as a way of “developing a form.” Christopher Briley, a founding partner of Briburn architecture firm and a passive house consultant, worked from a design initially conceived by Mimi and Barak (the latter studied architecture as an undergrad). Briley also guided the couple through the choices necessary to build a house that uses electricity only. Beyond what’s pulled in by the city grid, the house doesn’t use fossil fuels. It’s heated by mini-splits and a wood pellet stove. The double-framed walls are filled with blown-in cellulose—old newspaper treated and compacted so no “critters” can get in, says Barak. The extra-thick walls increase the R-value: in the summer, the interior stays cooler, and in winter, it’s warmer.

This isn’t the first house the couple built together. When Zu Bakery was based in South Freeport, which is where it was for the 22 years preceding the opening of the Clark Street location early last November, Barak lived in a cabin built on his brother’s land. Barak and Mimi met through mutual friends. She invited him to a potluck because that’s what you do when you have a potluck, she says: you invite everyone, even people you just met. (She was just really nice, clarifies Barak.) He was in graduate school at MECA at the time. She was living in the East End, teaching art at a school in southern Maine. Together they built a house onto Barak’s cabin, which became the guest quarters. The experience taught them a lot about house building, and what they would and wouldn’t do again. Two decades later, it was time to move back to town. “Let’s pivot our center,” Mimi said, who was by then working at Waynflete. They started looking for places in Portland and had seen only one when a friend and developer told them he’d purchased a lot in the West End. They bought it from him that same day. The house took three years to build. In 2012 they moved in.

“We didn’t bring a designer in to fill it with fashionable furniture,” says Mimi. They wanted to see what the space needed. Ten years later, the tone they’ve set is comfortable and livable, clean but engaged—there’s evidence that a family lives here. The dogs, Clover and Kipper, sleep in woven baskets near the ground-floor sliders. Sheepskin rugs hang from chair backs and rest on the couches (“I have a sheepie problem,” says Mimi). Over the couch, two prints show the accoutrements of Le Cafe and Le Pain, respectively. Mimi’s ceramics from various eras line the kitchen counter. Recently, the couple purchased a large, dark-wood bookcase for the living room. It’s an evolving space, and the house, like the bakery and even the short walk between the two, reflects the couple’s consideration of how lives are more about movement and process than they are about the containers necessary for the things we collect while living them.

Read More:

• 
  Designed to Flow
• 
  A Historic West End Brownstone Gets a Classic Renovation
• 
  Inside an Interior Designer’s Renovated Barn-Turned-Home in Freeport
• 
  A Curator’s Residence in Rockland is a Museum Unto Itself
• 
  A Tale of Two Realtors

The post Designed to Flow appeared first on The Maine Mag.

“Everything happened in this house,” says Jennifer Thayer. “The day we moved in, Greg proposed.” The house, a West End brownstone, is where the couple waited out the pandemic (they moved into the Pine Street property in late 2019). It’s also where they started their family (their daughter, Annie, is only weeks old). It seemed, at first, like an impossibility. A historic brownstone couldn’t possibly be in their price range, they thought. “Our realtor said, ‘You should check it out anyway; it’s actually a multi-unit,’” Jen remembers. “And the moment we walked in, we were in love.”

According to Greg, the building was a bit of a “diamond in the rough.” But, he says, “we could see that, underneath it all, it had good bones.” The previous owner had been renting out the upstairs unit on Airbnb, and an endless parade of temporary lodgers had taken their toll. It had been listed as a single unit, but because their realtor analyzed the listing details and realized it was in fact two units, the couple swiftly determined if they bought it, moved in upstairs, and rented out the bottom to a long-term tenant, maybe they could make the mortgage work. “The house had high ceilings, great mouldings, and fully exposed brick walls throughout. You could just see that it could be something great,” says Jen. Plus, there was the rooftop deck to consider. “It’s so rare to get a space like that in the middle of the city,” adds Greg.

So, they signed the papers, moved into the house, and began the slow process of renovation. Despite those lofty ceilings and that garden-ready deck, it did need work. Firstly, although Greg had noticed the “neat” features of the main living space—he admired the wide-plank floorboards and the old-fashioned cabinetry—he saw right away it was “odd.” Jen explains: “The kitchen space was large (approximately 450 square feet) but totally underutilized with a hidden spiral stairwell set into the middle of the room’s floor. This stairwell became the first object of our creativity. We needed to use it but we didn’t want to see it.” Naturally, the couple started their renovations there.

Inspired by images of marble waterfall countertops, Jen got an idea for a butcher-block waterfall island that would slide over the entry to the spiral staircase. It’s not quite a trap door, but it has a similar effect. Not only did this funky fix expand the usable portion of the kitchen, but it also visually connected the fragmented space. It wasn’t an easy task to complete. Before carpenter Rick Smith first visited, he wasn’t even sure he wanted to take the job, Jen recalls. “He was going to give us someone else’s name,” she says. “But he walked through and said, ‘Someone else is going to mess this up. The floors are all crooked.’ Out of nowhere, he said he’d do it.” Greg and Jen didn’t want seams in the wood, so Smith, using a block and tackle, hoisted the five-by-six-foot slab through the first and second floor stairwell and into the kitchen. To make the area look more cohesive, the couple brought the warm tones of cherrywood and brass to the forefront against a backdrop of blue and white cabinetry and gray marble, black soapstone, and gray quartzite. They brought in dining stools from Chilton Furniture to lend a bit of vintage charm to the room. “We both grew up in old or classic-style houses,” says Greg. “That’s why I love visiting Europe: the architecture. We both really appreciate the craft that goes into older houses.”

To honor the age of their new place (it was built in the 1860s) and the couple’s shared tastes, they opted not to knock down walls or go the open-concept route. “We really like that each room feels like its own distinct space,” says Jen. In the dining room, Smith was tasked with replicating the existing mouldings and extending them. The couple commissioned a local furniture maker, Alex Donatelle, to create a cherrywood sideboard by wainscotting the walls with wood paneling, and selected brass lamps to cast a soft glow that mimics candlelight. “Before, it was a perfectly nice room, but it fell flat,” says Greg. “I had this idea of trying to evoke the warmth and feeling of congeniality you find in old European ski chateaus.” There was one in particular that he had in mind: Hospiz Alm in St. Cristoph, Austria. Jen was on board, but she did have one major suggestion. “I had saved this color green on Pinterest maybe ten years ago,” she says. “I loved that green. I showed it to Greg, and he did, too.” After purchasing eight or nine samples of paint, they found a match: Verdigris by Benjamin Moore. “With so much in homebuilding, you try to find a close-enough match,” Greg reflects. “But with this green, in this room, I think we nailed it.”

They’re also happy with how the living room turned out, with a fresh coat of white paint, a warm Oriental rug, and a smattering of inherited antiques, including a cabinet made by Jen’s grandfather and a drafting table that once belonged to her grandmother. “She was an artist, and that piece is really special to me,” she says. “I use it as my desk.” Like her parents and grandparents before her, Jen tends to cart around antiques that she likes from house to house, waiting for the right space to place them. One, an old window with original glass panes, got installed in an interior wall to pull light from the east-facing living room into the dark hallway. “It now gets that nice morning light,” she says.

The bathroom closest to the couple’s bedroom was expanded and modernized, transformed into the most contemporary room in the house (“maybe even my favorite room,” Jen says). When the tiles she wanted for that space turned out to be too pricey, she DIYed a mosaic from seven different shapes and sizes. “It reminded me of the mosaic floors in Rome,” she says. The bathroom near the kitchen became a “space for a touch of humor,” according to Greg, thanks to a statement-making wallpaper mural sourced from Etsy. The guest room got a Murphy bed, and the roof deck got some updated decor, as did the lofted sleeping space at the tippy top of the house. “There’s still a lot we want to do,” says Jen. “We’re going to replace the vinyl windows with something more historically accurate. We’re doing it floor by floor because it’s expensive to meet the Historic Preservation Board’s requirements.” However, they don’t mind playing the long game. “For me, the story behind a home is important. I didn’t want to do it all at once, to snap my fingers and have the whole house done,” she says. “Your style changes as you change, which means the end result will be more interesting.” Judging by what we’ve seen so far, that seems a safe bet.

Read More:

• 
  Designed to Flow
• 
  A Historic West End Brownstone Gets a Classic Renovation
• 
  Inside an Interior Designer’s Renovated Barn-Turned-Home in Freeport
• 
  A Curator’s Residence in Rockland is a Museum Unto Itself
• 
  A Tale of Two Realtors

The post A Historic West End Brownstone Gets a Classic Renovation appeared first on The Maine Mag.

This story begins with a rundown cottage on a Maine island in the 1980s. On January 1, 1984, interior designer and painter Heidi Gerquest moved to Maine in the midst of a snowstorm. Gerquest, who hails from a family of artists, was 22 at the time. She had graduated from Hamilton College with a degree in art and was working as a painter specializing in custom wall motifs with big, exaggerated designs. “They might actually be back in style today,” she says with a laugh. Although the wall-painting business was paying the bills, she was ready for a bigger challenge in her new state.

With the help of her parents, Gerquest bought a deserted cottage on Peaks Island to test her mettle. “I really wanted to do a whole house,” she says. “I bought the cottage and fixed it up with the idea that I wasn’t going to spend more than 50 bucks on any one piece of furniture.” Along with several friends, Gerquest transformed the abandoned structure into an enviable residence, which she then entered into Metropolitan Home’s “Home of the Year” competition. The house not only won one of the competition’s categories but went on to be featured in numerous design-focused publications, pushing Gerquest into the national spotlight. “I just had a career all of a sudden,” she says, “without ever really intending to be an interior designer.”

Nearly 40 years later, Gerquest, who now lives in Freeport, has worked on projects around the world for clients of all backgrounds. The buzz around that first project on Peaks helped her to land big clients in New York City while still living in Maine, where she was raising her family and continuing to paint, selling her work at Greenhut Galleries in Portland and Leighton Gallery in Blue Hill, among others. During that time, Gerquest’s parents followed her from Riverside, Connecticut, and settled in Freeport, where in 1999 they built a large barn to serve as both a garage and a workshop for Gerquest’s father, who liked to restore wooden boats. When her parents decided to sell the barn in 2018, Gerquest and her partner, chef Johnny Walker, who has worked at venerable Portland establishments Local 188, Sonny’s, and Salvage BBQ, took on the project. The couple sold their home in South Freeport Village and moved into the building, which was considerably smaller than they were used to. “The downstairs was this big, raw cement space that my dad had used as his workshop. No finishing, no heat,” says Gerquest. “Upstairs was a little studio apartment that they rented out.”

The couple immediately began renovating the building, putting in an addition with a guest bedroom, a bathroom, and a mudroom. The main room, which had been the workshop, became a joint living room, dining room, and kitchen. They covered the cement floors, installed a gas fireplace, and thanks to Walker’s passion for cooking, equipped the kitchen for professional meal preparation. The upstairs apartment became the main bedroom, which also houses Gerquest’s office and the couple’s exercise bike. When COVID hit in early 2020, Walker, who was ready for a new project, retired from the restaurant business and threw himself into transforming the property’s outdoor space. With the help of Gerquest’s daughter, who was living with the couple for the first few months of the pandemic, Walker turned the dirt lot into lawn and gardens, accessible from the home through two large French doors that open onto a composite cement patio.

During the renovation, Gerquest and Walker decided to leave the transom over the barn doors but replace all the other windows. They kept the original structure’s height, accentuated by a large pulley hanging from a steel beam in the ceiling that slides back and forth, which Gerquest’s father had used to lift heavy objects. “We keep meaning to hang a mobile from it, or something cool like a chair,” she says. “But then we decided that our kids, and friends who have kids that are pretty wild, might go right through the window on the chair if they have too much fun flying back and forth!”

The focal point of the space became the barn doors, which look the same from the outside but no longer function. Instead, they are covered in white shiplap and now serve as a gallery space in the large main room of the home. “When I design somebody’s house,” says Gerquest, “if the client doesn’t have a starting place in their own mind, I’ll ask them to find an object that they feel attached to or that they feel reflects them, and we build from there. In my case, the starting point of this home was my art collection as a whole.” The wall, which measures roughly 10 by 12 feet, is filled with artwork from Gerquest’s friends and family. Included in the mix are a sculpture by her grandmother, a painting by her aunt, and works by now-famous artists like Edith Varian Cockroft (who studied painting in France under Matisse) that her grandfather, a ceramicist and an engineer by trade, received while building kilns for members of an artists’ community in Sloatsberg, New York, in the 1930s. Pieces by friends are also nestled into the mix, including photography by Gerquest’s first husband, Tonee Harbert, and works by his partner, Shoshanna White, both of whom Gerquest considers to be dear friends.

For Gerquest, her latest home is a reflection of her community in Maine. In addition to the artwork that represents her friends and family, the majority of the work on the home itself was also done by friends, down to the electrical wiring. While Gerquest and Walker didn’t intend to wind up in Freeport, since the majority of their friends are up the coast or in Portland, the couple is happy to stay put for now. Looking to the future, Gerquest and Walker have started a joint design project on a home near Brittany, France. Spending three months on, three months off between Maine and Europe, the couple is slowly working on renovations of this passion project. The ultimate goal is to retire spending half the year in France and, of course, half the year in Maine.

Read More:

• 
  Designed to Flow
• 
  Maple Madness
• 
  How to Keep Your Houseplants Alive This Winter
• 
  The Best Ski Gear From Maine
• 
  A Historic West End Brownstone Gets a Classic Renovation

The post Inside an Interior Designer’s Renovated Barn-Turned-Home in Freeport appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Rockland’s North End, a few blocks up from the ocean, is a neighborhood of shady trees, meandering gardens, and beautiful, idiosyncratic older houses. Nestled among these are a few remarkable examples of contemporary architecture, including artist and curator Anna Queen’s home and studio, which was completed in late 2020. The site once contained a structurally unsound antique house that held promise as a platform for something remarkable. “I wanted a space that reflected my work,” Queen says. We are in her pristine kitchen, which at the moment is graced by her two large striped cats, Basil and Dorian, and her slender brindled dog, Ernest. “It was important to me that everything be very minimal, with clean lines, open, and with good light—and having material be at the forefront.”

Queen, the curator of Dowling Walsh Gallery in downtown Rockland, maintains an independent curatorial practice and is a sculptor with a background in ceramics. Her art involves the use of readymade objects—such as a box of confectioners’ sugar and a Lucite-framed packing slip for a Roald Dahl book— presented cleanly and precisely to the viewer for a sense of connection, immediacy, and humor. These qualities are also present in her home, which combines a studio with living areas on three levels. New York architect Dimitri Brand—a friend of Queen’s since they attended art school together at the Maryland Institute College of Art—worked on the design with Queen, and local builder Casey Hufnagel saw the building process through to completion.

As in Queen’s sculptural practice, material specificity is the dominant factor in her home. The exterior, which has no street-facing windows but lets in abundant light from all other directions, is clad in pale metal, emphasizing its Modernist geometry and mirroring the landscape-focused geometric aesthetic of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts campus in Deer Isle. Inside, a glass door leads to the bright kitchen, which in turn opens into the artist’s studio. Translucent glass doors can close the kitchen and studio off from one another when more division is needed, and a sliding garage door to the backyard converts the studio into a semi-outdoor space in warmer months. The studio is lit with rosy, nebulous light from LEDs hidden in the slats of the wooden ceiling; the walls feature a recessed space at floor level in the place of trim board, visually lifting the height and emphasizing the gallery-like nature of the space. Cement floors are heated with hot water, which is the home’s only heat source, utilizing a heat recovery system for air exchange. Up a set of stairs (featuring a grid railing that echoes the grid-like tile in the quasi-futurist bathroom) is a living area with a step up to a sleeping area, and, accessible via a small ladder, an additional nook that looks out from below the high, peaked ceiling. Bright white walls move light through the space, filtering it from large windows and a tunnel-like skylight, which contains LEDs that continue its illumination at night. The natural linear wood patterns of the plywood are visible, and large, lush houseplants break up the regularity of the lines. “I like to shift the material, repeat it, and repeat it again,” Queen says.

Architect Dimitri Brand echoes Queen’s perceptive relationship to materials. “The house was conceived as orbiting around art making, with three primary goals: to be adaptable, minimal, and livable,” he says. “The space allows the art and objects in it to be the foreground, while also utilizing nonprecious materials that allow the house to be lived in.” Another important consideration in the home’s construction was affordability and sustainability. “As an all-electric house, it takes advantage of the fact that 79 percent of Maine’s electric generation comes from renewable sources and will only continue to get greener as the overall grid does,” says Brand.

The house’s location in Rockland connects it to the growing vibrancy of the midcoast arts community, being situated within walking distance to the Center for Maine Contemporary Art; the Farnsworth Museum; the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation (which is in the planning stages of expanding into a new and improved space); Interloc Projects; the Caldbeck Gallery; and of course, Dowling Walsh Gallery. Fresh aspects of community continue to unfurl and grow in the neighborhood, with new venues like the distillery Luce Spirits and various pop-up events.

Queen’s own art collection is also on a trajectory of growth as she acclimates to her studio. By prioritizing a blank space where most of the color and energy are concentrated in the artwork the house contains, Queen’s personal curatorial vision is given the chance to inhabit the interior with radiant strength. On the high wall of the open stairwell, Reggie Burrows Hodges’s 2019 painting Foundation has a sensual palette of pale, luminous colors against a canvas gessoed in black, depicting a man in a formal suit with a mysterious woman moving into the frame. The painting sets a tone of narrative complexity and powerful formal choices that continues throughout the house’s collection of contemporary artwork. Point of View Inn, a 2019 painting by Tessa Greene O’Brien, continues the sense of lurking magic in a composition that revolves around the shadowy, glimmering patterns in a swimming pool. Other artworks, by Sam Finkelstein, Jamie Gray Williams, Justine Kablack, Robert Hamilton, and Baxter Koziol, among others, move across the walls and up through the house’s levels to imbue the minimalist interior with narrative and meaning.

Looking ahead to future projects, Queen envisions finding new ways to share the powerful simplicity epitomized in her house—an incredibly productive container for the creative mind—with her community. Dreaming of creating a future multiuse flux space in the midcoast that draws artists and other intellectually motivated people to the area, she also posits the question of how affordable housing, access, and equity can become part of this growing conversation. The clarity and generosity of Queen’s home, studio work, and curatorial practice lead the way toward a future in which a white cube can hold both dynamic color and narrative, and barriers are lowered for creative people from all backgrounds, in Rockland and beyond.

Read More:

• 
  Designed to Flow
• 
  A Historic West End Brownstone Gets a Classic Renovation
• 
  Inside an Interior Designer’s Renovated Barn-Turned-Home in Freeport
• 
  A Curator’s Residence in Rockland is a Museum Unto Itself
• 
  A Tale of Two Realtors

The post A Curator’s Residence in Rockland is a Museum Unto Itself appeared first on The Maine Mag.

A sweeping view of Rockland Harbor, Rockland Breakwater Lighthouse, the Samoset Resort golf course and, beyond that, Vinalhaven—that’s what Michael McNaboe and his wife, Fletcher Smith-McNaboe, saw as they stood on the roof deck of a circa-1910 building in downtown Rockland, a property Fletcher had just shown to a potential client. Let’s just say realtors know a good house when they see one.

“We stood there for a while and thought, we need to make a move on this place,” says Michael, coowner of the couple’s own brokerage firm, City and Harbor Real Estate Group. Fortunately for them, the client decided to pass on the two-story warehouse—a property built by Standard Oil Company for welding oil tanks and boilerplates—that the sellers had converted into a home in the ’90s. “Once we got that answer, we called the owner, who happened to be a real estate broker we know, and asked if we could talk,” says Michael.

The three agents met at Safe Harbor Marina, and over a seaside coffee an offer was made. The owner would get exactly what she wanted for the unique property with a killer view, if she could give Michael and Fletcher some time to sell their own house first. “She agreed and took it off the market,” says Michael. “We were so happy because we had been worried. It was the beginning of this very fervid market, and we thought, if we’re not all-cash, and we can’t come in there and waive inspections, then we’re not going to get it.” Michael assumes the owner’s willingness to wait had to do not only with the fact that the three were colleagues in the same business, and in the same town, but also because her home would be going to a family with local ties: Michael is from Portland, and Fletcher grew up in St. George. “We were going to make it our home, not an income property,” he says, “and I think that was meaningful to her.”

Michael and Fletcher and their family of three girls moved into the house in August 2020, when the new normal meant many people were living all aspects of their lives—work, school, family— in one place. “We didn’t know what was going to happen with the pandemic,” says Michael. “We knew we could be on lockdown like other countries were doing.” But the house was everything they could have wanted—an oasis of peace and tranquility during that time. Between the pool and hot tub in the backyard, the family’s power boat—a Legacy 34 called Willowmere— docked just a five-minute walk away, and a three-story addition they refer to as the pool house, they could enjoy themselves without leaving home while still allotting everyone their own territory. “The kids can be watching Saved by the Bell in one room, and we can be watching Ozark in the other room, and no one would know,” says Michael.

The couple may miss some of the details of their former Victorian—charming rooms with beautiful woodwork and mouldings, a quaint parlor—which “sold in about a minute,” according to Michael, but with three daughters suddenly follow-ing them around asking what to do with themselves, the new, larger house with separate living areas gave everyone the space they needed to breathe.

One of the first things Fletcher and Michael did to put their stamp on the house was to add an exterior entrance to the roof deck, the spot they fell in love with in the first place. “When we bought the house, we had to go through the pool house bedroom to access it,” says Michael. “Which is where my 17-year-old sleeps but doesn’t appreciate it,” he adds with a laugh. This meant that, to share the incredible outdoor location with their friends, the couple had to drag them through their daughter’s bedroom. “Believe it or not, that deck ended up barely being used,” Michael says. Since the roof itself needed replacing, they went ahead and redesigned the deck: bigger, with modern horizontal cable railing, and a stair down to the patio so that people can access it from below.

Inside the house, they renovated the kitchen, install-ing flat slab, high-gloss cabinets, a pure white quartz countertop, and new, taller Thermador appliances to fit the large, 16-foot-high ceiling space. They also tore out the staircase with its colonial-style oak spindles. Black, wrought-iron pipe spindles and square newels immediately brought a more contemporary feel.

The result? No more real estate envy. “Being realtors, we see a lot of beautiful homes, magnificent, 2.5-million-dollar houses on the water,” says Michael. “And then you go back to your house, and you’re disappointed. We didn’t want to feel that way anymore. And we never do.”

Read More:

• 
  Designed to Flow
• 
  A Historic West End Brownstone Gets a Classic Renovation
• 
  Inside an Interior Designer’s Renovated Barn-Turned-Home in Freeport
• 
  A Curator’s Residence in Rockland is a Museum Unto Itself
• 
  A Tale of Two Realtors

The post A Tale of Two Realtors appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Photographer and gallerist Meredith Perdue’s backyard sauna project started with a love for cold water—swimming, that is. Following Nordic trends, including hot-and-cold therapy that has long been a way of life in those countries’ oft-frigid climes, in the past few years Perdue has gotten into dipping and plunging into the ocean year-round. “I actually like to end on cold,” says Perdue, “so I’ll do a sauna and then go to the ocean.”

Perdue and her husband, Michael Cain, live in a renovated 1750s Cape in the Willard Beach neighborhood of South Portland, and the water is just a few blocks from their front door. After a vacation in Sweden in May 2018, where two of the hotels they visited had saunas on-site, the couple ordered one of their own. The kit came from Almost Heaven Saunas, a company based in West Virginia, and arrived with two preassembled barrel ends and cedar slats to attach between them. “My husband likes to compare it to a Lincoln Logs set,” says Perdue.

After tearing down an old, dilapidated shed, the perfect footprint for such a project, Perdue’s husband and stepfather got to work building a platform to act as both a level surface for the sauna and a visual break between the yard’s mulched garden beds and the keystone patio. The platform also provides a place for people to step out to when cooling down. Perdue stresses how easy the sauna was to put together, noting that the platform took longer to build than the sauna kit took to assemble. “It’s completely changed my outlook on winter,” she says. “Whether it’s a kit or some sort of DIY option, we have seen so many saunas pop up in the neighborhood. It feels like a natural fit for the Maine climate.”

How to Sauna

Wood-fired or electric?
Perdue’s sauna is electric, but if you want a more romantic feel as well as the ritual that comes with stoking a fire, consider a wood-burning version. “As two southerners,” Perdue says, “we just wanted something as easy as possible.” She loves being able to flip a switch to get it fired up. In the depths of winter, it takes just about an hour to reach 180 degrees. “We have rules where we can’t talk about stresses or work,” says Perdue. “No politics, nothing that would upset.”

The best time to sauna
“Because we’re just a five-minute bike ride to the beach, it’s the perfect location for completing hot-cold cycles—riding to the ocean for a dip, riding back for a sauna, and repeating the process a couple of times,” Perdue says. “The sweet spot for that is April and May, and then September through November, when the water is really cold but the weather is warm enough that you’ve either brought your bike out for the year or you’ve kept your bike out.” Don’t live close to the beach? Winter is the perfect time for breaking up your cycles with rolls in the snow. “I’ve also been known to just take a cold shower afterwards,” notes Perdue. “My perfect evening includes a sauna at some point because it helps me sleep.”

Make it social
None of Perdue’s friends have been in the sauna since COVID, but she’s looking forward to getting friends and family back into the heat. “We do birthday dips or New Year’s Day dips in the ocean with friends, where everyone then runs to the sauna,” she says. “It’s a nice way to do something social—dip, sauna, and then eat some food afterwards.”

Read More:

• 
  Designed to Flow
• 
  Maple Madness
• 
  How to Keep Your Houseplants Alive This Winter
• 
  The Best Ski Gear From Maine

The post A Sauna Transforms a South Portland Backyard into a Year-Round Oasis appeared first on The Maine Mag.

When architect Kevin Browne and his wife, Heather, bought their place in Sugarloaf’s Redington East neighborhood, the mountain became a huge part of their family’s life. Whether it’s summer or winter, they find themselves hitting the road on Friday after work and school and heading up north, not to return until Sunday. “The kids look forward to it as much as we do,” Browne says, calling Sugarloaf their happy place. They discovered their house eight years ago when visiting friends in the area. “We started skiing at Shawnee Peak when the kids were three and six, but then as they got older, we thought they were ready for a bigger mountain,” Browne says. Initially the couple was looking to simply rent something near their friends. One day while visiting they were supposed to go hiking but it rained, so they drove around looking at properties. The place had been on the market for around a year and a half. They went for it. After many renovations, upgrades, and experiments, Browne says, “I think we’re done now.” Below, Browne shares with us some bits of advice for fellow renovators.

Don’t worry if something is dated. Worry about bones.

“The neighborhood was started in the 1970s—other friends bought a home here with the original shag carpet. Ours was also dated, but the layout turned out to be more comfortable living than our home in Falmouth. The main space is on the second floor, and it’s nice and open, with a woodstove in the living room. We’ve been slowly updating, biting off a little more each year since we bought it—covering over the old textured wood siding (both inside and out), replacing the Formica countertops, the old stove and hood, tearing out nasty carpet and installing new carpet—and now I think we’re finally done.”

No mudroom? No problem.

“The big thing we did to the original house was to add a 10-by-10 mudroom off the driveway side. Before, it was just a three-story wall with a stair that went up to the second-floor entrance. Adding the mudroom really helped give the house a little more curb appeal. Plus, people would just come in and drop everything—bags and shoes and gear—in the living room. I had a good friend of mine, Brian Stearns of Stearns Woodwork, build it, and he also installed the bench and built-ins surrounding it. We use the house just as much in the summer as we do in the wintertime, for mountain biking and hiking, so the room had to be able to hang bikes on the wall in the summer and skis in the winter, and to store all the different boots that go with all the different types of skiing that we do. It’s great, just having that extra entry space and a place to take your shoes off.”

Consider the pantry.

“There’s a space off the kitchen that used to be the second-floor entryway, and we had it converted into a big pantry. We have a lot of family and friends come to visit, and they always bring big bags of food. Rather than having them drop it all on the kitchen counter, that pantry space has been great for getting it all out of the way.”

Go big where it matters.

“We’ve slowly replaced every window in the house with windows from Marvin Design Gallery from Eldredge Lumber in Portland. We’ve also redone the siding—in phases, with the last two sides not going on until last year. They were the expensive sides, with massive windows looking out toward Sugarloaf. The cabinets are original. We just painted them and had new countertops from IKEA put in. The table we got is also IKEA—there’s a lot of IKEA stuff. We were trying to make it a little more Scandinavian with the birch veneer plywood, brighten it up. It was dated and dingy, and it was fully furnished, too. We took a lot of trips to the dump.”

Get a little experimental.

“The changes we’ve made in the house are a little more experimental than the work I normally do because, as I view it, it’s a camp and it doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s been fun to say, ‘Yeah, let’s try this out!’ Like the mudroom: We were able to get one of the old ski-lift chairs from the Bucksaw lift that they took down probably five or six years ago. I just luckily saw it on Facebook—they announced they were getting rid of around 100 chairs and were asking like $250 or $350 for them. I was like, ‘I’ll buy one!’ They were gone in half an hour. We integrated it into the bench in the mudroom, with Brian building new chair slats for it, anchoring it in, and then building all the little cubbies around it.”

Read More:

• 
  Designed to Flow
• 
  Maple Madness
• 
  How to Keep Your Houseplants Alive This Winter
• 
  The Best Ski Gear From Maine

The post An Architect Transforms a Dated Sugarloaf Home appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Friends often make the best collaborators. So, when Melanie and Pliny Reynolds, East End residents and business owners, saw that the compound around the Portland Observatory on Munjoy Hill was up for sale, they tapped their friendships to snag the property and transform the historic buildings.

The couple, who at the time needed a larger space for their growing family, fantasized about turning one of the buildings into a guesthouse and living in the other. They proposed the guesthouse idea to their long-time friends Whitney and Jon Lendzion, who were as intrigued by the location as they were and agreed that the time was ripe to bring a distinctive accommodation to the hill.

The four friends make an ideal quartet for starting a business: Whitney is an interior designer, Jon is a contractor, Pliny is an architectural designer, and Melanie has experience in branding and hospitality. “We all brought something separate to the table,” says Melanie. “And we have a lot of friends in the trades industries locally, so we knew we had all the key players who could help us put it together in a special way.”

First developed by local entrepreneur Captain Lemuel Moody in the early 1800s, the compound included a marine signal tower (now the Portland Observatory, the oldest tower of its type in the United States), a house, and a dance hall and bowling alley, where townspeople and shipping industry travelers alike gathered to carouse. Moody’s granddaughter Elizabeth lived in the house where the Reynoldses now reside, and at one point rented out rooms for overnight guests. “What’s really neat about it for me is that these two properties are joined again for the first time in a long time,” says Melanie. “Reconnecting them and creating this space for guests to enjoy in the same way that people did a hundred years ago, it’s kind of a rebirth, but modernized.”

The name Best Bower, which Jon came up with, has several meanings: it’s the forward anchor on a ship, the card that ranks above the others in a particular hand, and it’s also another word for arbor. The idea of a hidden, unassuming space especially resonated with the group, as the modern iteration of the property started with the courtyard garden, which had become overgrown from years of neglect. “A sloped side yard shouldered by both the Observatory and a mature oak tree provided a natural opportunity for an enclosed terraced garden with communal seating,” says Whitney, who worked on the design. Whitney also did the gardening and landscaping alongside Jon, while Cape Landscapes built the stone walls and laid the brickwork.

Inside, the Best Bower’s six rooms are bright with natural light but also notably private. Four of the rooms have exterior entrances off the courtyard, and the remaining two rooms, which are accessed from the street, have interior entrances on separate floors. “It was important to us to make guests feel like their room belongs to them,” says

Whitney. Much like an Airbnb rental, Best Bower, which opened on Memorial Day of this year, is for the most part a self-service place, complete with a shared kitchenette that includes a full-size refrigerator and a compact convection oven big enough to, say, heat up a premade lasagna from Rosemont Market and Bakery up the street. There are also add-on food packages that Melanie sources from local purveyors, such as a cheese and charcuterie board featuring picks from the Cheese Shop of Portland. “Once people are here they can reach out to me as much or as little as they want,” explains Melanie.

Because the team needed to fit six guest rooms into a relatively small footprint, unique rooms emerged. The room at the end of the courtyard, for example, has a particularly high ceiling, inspiring the team to add a coffered wooden design. Whitney’s brother, Wylie Wirth of Fine Furniture Solutions, used reclaimed white oak to create both the ceiling and a paneled sliding door for the room dubbed the Library.

The decor for the other rooms evolved in the same way, starting with architectural features and fanning out from there. Friends from the firm John Sparre helped to build wooden lofts for the next two rooms (Loft East and Loft West), which were narrow and tall and needed, in Whitney’s words, “large brushstrokes that were materials-driven.”

Both the last room on the courtyard (the Courtyard Queen) and the first room on the ground floor as entered from the street (the Congress Queen) have more standard volumes. “We had been stockpiling giant red oak logs from around southern Maine for the last 20 years,” says Whitney, “and we finally got to use them for built-in closets and dry bars.” Executed by Andrew Boshe of Green Tree Carpentry and Wylie Wirth, the red oak gave these rooms the punch they needed.

The sixth room, which is upstairs and off the street, has a sloped ceiling, creating the perfect opportunity for skylight views of the Observatory (in fact, three of the rooms have skylights). “The skylights frame the Observatory in a really unexpected way that you wouldn’t see anywhere else,” says Melanie. More red oak paneling, slab countertops, and quarter-sawn cabinetry by Joe Seremeth from WoodLab give the room, which is called the Crow’s Nest, a boat-like feel. “In each case, the rooms and their built details evolved in concert with the trades-person or craftsperson working on them,” says Whitney. “The Best Bower is just as much theirs as it is ours.”

Read More:

• 
  Claiming Space at the Table
• 
  How to Go Antiquing Like a Mainer
• 
  Four Young Writers to Watch in the Pine Tree State
• 
  Milkweed Man

The post A New Portland Guesthouse Gives a Historic Building a Second Life appeared first on The Maine Mag.

In March of 2020, Samuel Snider, an antique textile clothing designer based in New York, was in Paris preparing for a flight bound for Milan. Then borders began to close. “I had been planning to visit factories and look into manufacturing so that I could move over there,” Snider explains. But since Northern Italy was the first COVID-19 hot spot in Europe, Snider’s flight home from Milan got canceled. He cut his trip short and returned to New York, which within days was in full pandemic mode.

Snider had already alerted his Nolita landlords about his impending move, so he needed to find somewhere else to live by the summer. “I didn’t want to stay in New York and sign another apartment lease, because I had already been of the mind that I was going to leave,” he says. On top of wanting to escape the city, Snider’s clothing line— simple, early-twentieth-century workwear-inspired pieces cut from vintage French linen—was taking a hit. “Most of my orders for the collection I had just shown were being scaled back or canceled,” he says.

He decided to put his brand on pause, to give himself breathing room and time before moving forward. “My family has a property in Monmouth on Lake Cobbosseecontee, and I was here visiting when I decided to figure out a way to stay.”

The most obvious people to turn to for housing advice were Snider’s good friends Sharon and Paul Mrozinski, co-owners of the Marston House, a venerable antique shop previously located in Wiscasset and now in Vinalhaven. Several years before, Snider had walked into the Wiscasset shop, and before long was not only sourcing linen from Sharon—one of her specialties is homespun French textiles from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that she buys from her second home in Southern France—but soon the two also developed a connection resembling family. Sharon reached out to friends and soon found Snider an apartment (what he refers to as his “little attic tree house”) on the top floor of a three-story townhouse owned by the proprietor of Rock Paper Scissors, which is on the first floor.

All angled ceilings and corner nooks, the 700-square-foot apartment fits Snider’s vibe. “I walked in, and it was very simple and small and just seemed perfect for a transitional time,” he says. “And it was available on the day that I had to move out of my apartment in New York. It seemed like maybe I should just do this and live in Wiscasset.”

Simultaneously, Sharon and Paul were “stuck” in France with no possible return date, thanks to COVID. They asked Snider for a return favor; a container full of recently found antiques was destined to land in Maine: could he put them into storage? Snider said yes—sort of. Instead of packing the pieces away, he rented the empty storefront across from his apartment on Water Street and turned it into a pop-up shop, selling the Mrozinskis’ wares while simultaneously figuring out what he wanted to do next.

“I’ve always had an interest in antiques; it’s always been a hobby of mine,” he says. “With my clothing line I was already doing a lot of buying in that world, and through that I became interested in early furniture and objects. I decided maybe I would want to explore that side of myself, rather than just as a hobby.” Snider enjoyed the work so much that he decided when the couple returned he would reopen the store with his own inventory and give antiquing a go.

Enter Samuel Snider Antiques, which opened on Memorial Day of this year and focuses on New England Americana. Like any antiques dealer, Snider buys from multiple sources—estate sales, fairs, individuals—but the bulk of his inventory comes from other dealers whom he respects. “I can learn from them, and I also know that everything I’m getting is guaranteed,” he says. “There’s trust there.” Snider loves the chase, he says, including the fact that there’s one of each thing, and if you find it, people can’t go out and find it again.

The hardest part is determining what goes into the shop and what makes it home to the attic. “At the moment I’ve been putting my best stuff into the store,” Snider says. But he admits that a lot of the things in his apartment are things he’s “stolen back” from his shop. “And then maybe one day I’ll sell them. It is a constant fluctuating thing.”

Read more shelter stories:

• 
  Designed to Flow
• 
  A Historic West End Brownstone Gets a Classic Renovation
• 
  Inside an Interior Designer’s Renovated Barn-Turned-Home in Freeport
• 
  A Curator’s Residence in Rockland is a Museum Unto Itself

The post An Antique Dealer’s Treasure-Filled Wiscasset Apartment appeared first on The Maine Mag.

If you are someone who owns geese, or someone who has made a pandemic-prompted midnight Google search about backyard farm animals, it is not improbable that you would have stumbled upon Kirsten Lie-Nielsen. Her Instagram account, @hostilevalleyliving, has over 34,000 followers, and she has published two books: The Modern Homesteader’s Guide to Keeping Geese and So You Want to Be a Modern Homesteader? It was Lie-Nielsen’s flock of geese, in fact, that prompted her and her husband, Patrick Tracy Jackson III, to move from their home in Woolwich, across the river from Bath, to a 200-year-old, 93-acre homestead in Liberty.

“The geese had such personalities and were a lot of fun, but they also had a habit of sitting in the middle of the road,” says Lie-Nielsen. “We always talked about getting a farm, going somewhere more rural, but the geese in the road was like, ‘Alright, maybe we should really do this.’”

In 2015 they found their spot: a nineteenth-century New England Cape that had been in the same family right up until Lie-Nielsen set eyes on it. “It’s known locally as the old Whitaker farm,” she explains. “The Whitakers were the descendants of a ship captain who came up here in the early 1800s.”

While it’s unusual that a home would remain in the same bloodline for so long, the downside in this case was the family’s waning interest over the years: the active farm eventually slowed to a halt, and the farm-turned-summer place was abandoned sometime in the 1970s. When Lie-Nielsen and Jackson moved in, the fields were overgrown and completely unworkable. And, while the buildings were in decent shape structure-wise, Lie-Nielsen says the main house was like a time capsule to the 1800s. “There was no electricity—it had never been wired for electricity at all. No running water. There was a woodstove in the kitchen, and that was about it.”

The couple’s back-to-the-land leap was a bona fide one. They prioritized their animals and their goals for the farm, and for the first two years they “camped” in the house. “We had a bed, but our kitchen was in the barn because we got water over there first,” Lie-Nielsen says. They had a bucket for a composting toilet and an outdoor shower that they used even in the winter—that is, when the pipes weren’t frozen.

In the summer of 2018, after two years of focusing on land management using their goats, sheep, and geese and planting a vibrant garden that could supply the couple with nearly all their food, they set up a large camping tent in the yard to sleep in and got to work on the main house. “The tent gave us a real sense of urgency because, as it started getting chillier, we were like, ‘We have to finish!’” Lie-Nielsen says with a laugh.

Jackson did all the design work, and with the help of a few hired neighbors the house was outfitted with all the modern amenities by the fall. “I have learned so many skills through this project,” says Lie-Nielsen. “Before it was, ‘Oh, you just turn the tap on, and that’s how you get water,’ but now I actually understand how things work.”

In the woodshed, an L-shaped outbuilding off the back of the house, the couple knocked down a wall, put in floors, and added large picture windows and a woodstove. The windows add a generous amount of sunlight, and the stove keeps the entire home warm all winter long. “Now I can have all the houseplants I want,” Lie-Nielsen says. The chicken coop, which they reshingled themselves last summer, has been turned into a gardening shed. Lie-Nielsen describes it as the kind of building most people would just tear down, but like everything on Hostile Valley Farm, Lie-Nielsen says, you just have to squint your eyes to see the potential: “How can we make the old new again instead of just giving up?”

The post A Homesteading Couple Revives a 200-Year-Old Maine Farm appeared first on The Maine Mag.