Migdalia Mass felt like Auburn’s William A. Robinson House had been waiting just for her: its pitched gables, its smokey-gray board-and-batten siding, its ornate tower, with 16 gargoyles shaped into brackets and carved onto trim. She and her husband, Joseph, were living in Washington State when they bought the 1874 Gothic Revival, sight unseen, after viewing an online listing. “This is the house I’ve wanted since I was a little kid — all the nooks and crannies, the preserved pocket doors, the height,” says Migdalia, who, growing up in Puerto Rico and New York, dreamed of becoming a vampire and counted Halloween as her favorite holiday. Later, she worked for the Army — in mortuary affairs. Before closing on the home, she says, “I was thinking about all the Halloween dinner parties I’d host. And I didn’t even know about the gargoyles yet.”

Now, the Hollywood-level horror props she’s been amassing for decades have a proper resting place. During the last week of September, the Masses unleash the lot into every room in their home: 21 skeletons; 16 animatronic mannequins that scream, cackle, and warn of impending doom; nine life-size witches; two dozen skulls; a hunchbacked zombie-butler named James; a haunted dollhouse; a wooden casket; a half gallon of fake blood to be poured into goblets and splattered on props; innumerable creepy crawlies; glowing orbs; strobe lights; and, for the annual dinner party, a rubber corpse whose open chest cavity is stuffed with pork ribs charred by Migdalia.

Mass’s friend Tizz Crowley often joins her, donning period garb for events at the Androscoggin Historical Society. Crowley’s “Civil War widow” dress (top) enhances Mass’s morbid decorating vibe. Plus, Mass says, “She blends in with my witches.”

“I don’t plan,” Migdalia says. “I may have a general idea, but mostly I let things talk to me.” In years past, she has staged a Victorian funeral in the parlor with a corpse wrapped in a bloody blanket in the casket, hosted a wedding reception in the living room with zombies cutting into a “rotting” black cake (“They’re a beautiful couple. The guy kind of looks like Johnny Depp”), and installed a glowing ghost bride engulfed in swirling mist from a fog machine in the tower. She doctors her plastic skeletons with paint, synthetic skin, and a blowtorch to make them look freshly decomposed, builds cages for skeletons out of old screen doors, and creates “hocus pocus books” with plastic eyeballs protruding from faux-leather-bound tomes. Recently, she had a mason who was repairing the foundation in the home’s attached barn embed plastic bones in the mortar and a skeleton beneath the floorboards. “One day, someone will find him, and it’ll be my after-life joke,” Migdalia says.

The Masses do not open their home to the public, but they welcome trick-or-treaters. (Although the deadly makeup Migdalia wears has made some of them run in fear.) “Even if no one comes to the door, I still love it; I do it for me,” she says. “It’s fun, unless you’re my cousin. My husband puts up a camcorder when she visits. She cries, she screams, she swears. I used to force her to play funeral with me when we were kids, so she shows up already sweating, even when it’s like 10 degrees outside.”

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By Sara Anne Donnelly
Photos by Rachel Sieben
From the Fall 2023 issue of Maine Homes by Down East

“I’ve always been drawn to odd, Edward Scissorhandsy things, and this house felt like a place where my things fit,” floral designer Anika Wilson says, referring to the “lived-in” Cape she and her husband, Giles Healey, bought in 2015. Built in 1816, on land bequeathed to the original owner by King George III, the home sits at the end of a long dirt drive behind a stand of old-growth trees that shields it from a busy road just outside of Portland. Wilson keeps chickens, ducks, geese, peafowl, and sheep on the 34-acre property, which includes her flower garden and a swath of dense forest. Inside, “the windowsills and doors are caked with so much paint they feel kind of bumpy. The stairs are steep and creaky. Nothing’s perfect,” she says. “And to me, that’s what a house is.”

Clockwise from top left: An entry staircase in Behr’s Drama Queen picks up the shades in acrylic-and-ink abstracts by Portland’s Victor Stewart; on the radiator are woodblock prints by Japanese artist Tetsuo Aoki. In Anika Wilson and Giles Healey’s living room, a bouquet by Wilson, who owns Bad Rabbit Flowers, and a bull skull set off the granite fireplace. In the living room, a whimsical nuLOOM rug complements linen pillows from Etsy that read like abstract art and a cherry coffee table with a pair of golden hands by Wilson’s grandfather, artist William Wilson.

When they bought the place, Wilson, who traveled the world working as a scuba instructor for nearly a decade, had amassed a Pinterest board of decorating ideas and was ready to put down roots. “I’d lived out of a suitcase for most of my life since I left home, so it was a weird nesting thing,” she says. First, she and Healey redesigned the kitchen, knocking down a wall to open up the space and replacing old upper cabinets with wood shelving. Fresh white paint on the walls provides a clean backdrop for the floral and produce bounty she hauls in from the garden; in the adjoining dining area, tone-on-tone grays on walls and wainscoting set off a prolific liquor collection that includes homemade infusions. Elsewhere, electric accents, like bright coral on the entryway trim and stairs and marigold on doors and dining chairs, rebel against the Scandinavian minimalism of her childhood home in New York, where her Swedish mother’s palette “was like a thousand shades of white.”

From left: The Cape’s front door, in Benjamin Moore’s Citrus Blast, radiates against clapboards in the company’s Deep Space. Healey and Wilson, pictured with their chickens and Babydoll sheep, Oskar.

When the refurbishing was complete, Wilson unboxed her things. Since childhood, she has amassed art, trinkets, and oddities from thrift stores and family members. Her collection to date is too large to display at once, so she constantly rotates pieces in and out. Among them: cross-eyed doll heads, vintage globes, gold horse figurines, resin human skulls, big-game skulls, a glass menagerie, and her grandfather’s wooden sculptures of giant tools poking out of rough-hewn bases. Many of the items are creepy, though Wilson prefers the term mysterious. “I like a little bit of darkness,” she says, pointing to inspiration from her grandfather’s macabre art, her father’s animal-skeleton collection, showcased in the living room when she was growing up, and her mother’s book of illustrated Scandinavian fairy tales, where glowing fairies hovered over mist-covered glens and trolls lurked under stones at the bottom of waterfalls. “It was not the classic fairy tales of princes and princesses,” Wilson says. “It was darker and more deep than that, and I loved it.”

Clockwise from top left: Wilson is writing a book on homemade liquor infusions, and her research library is stored in the dining room above a mid-century-style sideboard from Craigslist. In the entry, a psychedelic bath mat, gifted by Wilson’s mother, lightens the mood, while a theatrical gravity rules the dining room, with its walls in Behr’s Asphalt Gray and antique portraits of doleful strangers bought at an estate sale. In the primary bedroom, monochromatic bedding from English Bed Linen Company mellows out a lively Boho rug from Safavieh.

One might easily feel unsettled in a home where severed wooden hands grip the ends of the living-room coffee table — another of Wilson’s grandfather’s creations. But the experience here is playful, even life-affirming. “I don’t want my house to feel overly intentional or stuffy, just fun,” Wilson says. “It’s a reflection of me, so it’s colorful, chaotic, and a little strange.” On a recent afternoon, she and Healey relaxed in the living room beneath a hollow-eyed longhorn-bull skull mounted over the fireplace and a half dozen unblinking doll heads arrayed on shelves. Outside, their Babydoll sheep, Oskar and Elmo, grazed placidly in the gathering mist. Soon, they’ll try to come in, Wilson said, because they’re convinced they’re dogs. It’s weird, she knows, but that’s to be expected.

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After Phil Rose retired from teaching high-school English, he launched a boat-delivery service and, in 2000, built himself a house shaped like a prow. Perched on a bluff on Machiasport’s Howard Cove, where the Rose family has summered for more than a century, the folded-in A-frame is surrounded by granite outcrops and blueberry bushes that “emerge from the house like a wake,” says Phil’s son, Rich, who now owns the place with his wife, Julie. By contrast, the opposing façade is a simple gabled box, amplifying the drama when you round the “hull.” After Phil passed away, in 2011, Rich and Julie brought in Marshfield contractor Donald Cole Jr., who said, “As an English-teacher-carpenter, I give your father an A-minus,” Rich remembers. “Grading him as an actual carpenter, I might not be so generous.” The couple installed a foundation, finished the crude interior, and cut a network of trails on the property’s 12 acres. But Phil’s expression of a grounded ship remains the most enchanting feature. “If you’re in the second-floor bedroom during a storm, the waves come up and you can’t see the cliff,” Rich says. “Then you’re on the vessel.”

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Maine’s most influential architects since the early 19th century designed buildings that expressed the priorities and aspirations of their generation. But their projects were not merely of the moment. They often worked on the cutting edge of aesthetics and engineering, creating structures that continue to elevate our daily lives. Here, we introduce 10 colorful characters — including an outspoken modernist and a militiaman who attempted to annex Canada — who profoundly shaped the way Maine looks.

Meet the Experts

FREDERICK L. SAVAGE

Claim to Fame: Savage’s hundreds of houses, hotels, and public buildings are as integral to the understated elegance of Mount Desert Island’s built landscape as John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s carriage roads and stone bridges. He’s best known for Shingle-style cottages, but he was equally skilled in traditional regional forms, such as his additions to the 1820 Cape named Old Homestead, in Northeast Harbor, and in classic styles like his own 1901 Tudor Revival home, in Bar Harbor, now the Atlantean Cottage inn. Savage’s portfolio, amassed between the 1890s and 1920s, also includes grand cottages in Dark Harbor, on Islesboro.

History: Savage’s ancestors settled in Northeast Harbor in 1798, and his parents founded the Asticou Inn, in 1883. In his early 20s, he worked as a carpenter on Harvard College president Charles Eliot’s summer home, leading Eliot to persuade his brother-in-law, Boston architect Robert Swain Peabody, to hire Savage as an apprentice. The refined Savage aesthetic extended to his nephew, Charles, who designed Northeast Harbor’s Asticou Azalea and Thuya gardens.

From left: Sunset Ledge cottage, photographed by Jeff Roberts; the Asticou Inn, photographed by Sue Anne Hodges.

Highlights: Though 6,500 square feet, the Shingle-style Sunset Ledge cottage, in Northeast Harbor, typifies the genre’s informality and Savage’s deference to natural surroundings. He designed it and the Colonial Revival replacement for the fire-damaged Asticou Inn in 1900. Larger than anything Savage had conceived to date, the inn was a career milestone, according to Savage biographer John M. Bryan, who says the commission likely paid for the construction of the Atlantean and signaled Savage’s foray into other styles.

EATON W. TARBELL

Claim to Fame: Tarbell not only introduced modernist architecture to Maine, in the mid-1940s, he advocated for it, meeting with community groups to explain his projects and the evolution of building design. His work often met resistance; nevertheless, he was prolific: He retired in 1988 with 2,500 buildings to his credit, most of them in Bangor and eastern and northern Maine. Ever the educator, he championed modernism even as he was closing his office, telling the Bangor Daily News that new buildings executed in antique styles were “fake, all fake . . . You don’t want a grandfather and his grandson walking down the street in the same clothes, do you?”

History: Born in Aroostook County, Tarbell studied under modernism pioneer Walter Gropius, at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 1947, when he was 33, Industrial Design magazine declared his sleek corporate guesthouse, in Brewer, one of the year’s best new buildings. In 1952, Bangor’s Vine Street School scored high in a national design contest and celebrated with an Eaton Tarbell Day open house. Trailblazing came with risks too. Tarbell accepted blame when a portion of Waterville Junior High’s flat roof collapsed after a multi-day snowstorm, in 1978.

From left: The Green House, photographed by Trent Bell; Bangor’s One Merchants Plaza, photographed by David Hughes.

Highlights: Tarbell’s best-known work, the 1955 Bangor Auditorium, embodied the city’s ambitions with a roof resembling uplifted wings. It was demolished, in 2013. Though twice renovated, the 1970s oceanfront residence referred to as the Green House evidences Tarbell’s hand with its flat roofs and expansive glass. Built of weathering steel and bronze-tinted glass, Bangor’s One Merchants Plaza remains much as Tarbell designed it, in 1972.

FRANCIS H. FASSETT

Claim to Fame: Fassett was a leading architect in Portland, and is credited with helping rebuild much of the city after the Great Fire of 1866. His work over 50 years embodies many of Maine’s best public and private buildings.

History: Born in Bath, Fassett learned carpentry, draftsmanship, and design as a teenage apprentice to architect and builder Isaac Cole and studied architecture at firms in Boston and New York. He was 24 when he opened his first office, in Bath, and for the next 16 years, he designed houses and other buildings throughout the Kennebec Valley. In 1863, he relocated to Portland, first working primarily in the Queen Anne style, then transitioning to Romanesque and Classical Revival genres. Most of his surviving buildings are historic landmarks, such as the 1888 Richardsonian Romanesque Baxter Library, a richly textural mix of red brick, sandstone, and brown freestone, and Sacred Heart Church, inspired by Notre-Dame de la Garde, in Marseille, and completed in 1908, not long after Fassett’s death, at age 86. Fassett had been working his own ideas into sketches of the French basilica since he first saw it nearly 40 years earlier.

From left: The Francis hotel, photographed by Irvin Serrano; Francis H. Fassett’s 1876 West End home, photographed by Scott T. Hanson.

Highlights: Two Fassett buildings in Portland now offer lodging. Maine Preservation gave one of its 2017 Honor Awards to The Francis hotel for its restoration of the 1881 mansion that Fassett designed for dry-goods purveyor Mellen E. Bolster. Fassett’s own 1876 West End home is a 3,900-square-foot, High Gothic–style duplex with tall pointed gables and a tower trimmed in lacy ironwork. One side is an Airbnb; the other houses condos.

WILFRED E. MANSUR

Claim to Fame: Bangor’s leading architect in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, Mansur so dominated the brisk reconstruction of downtown after the Great Fire of 1911 that even today he is largely to credit for its look and feel. Mansur was skilled in various current and developing styles. “If he had lived in a more important place, the consistent quality and versatility of his work would have earned him a national reputation,” Deborah Thompson writes in her architectural history.

History: Mansur started out as a carpenter, first appearing in the city directory as an architect, in 1884. By then, he’d had his first municipal commission, the 1882 Bangor High School. His work over the next decade — in particular the 1891 Richardson Romanesque YMCA — “made his talent so obvious that it no longer seemed necessary or advisable to call upon an architect from elsewhere,” Thompson says. His contributions to the Great Fire of 1911 Historic District include the Graham, Stetson, Sterns, and Nichols blocks.

From left: The 1911 Graham Building, photo courtesy of Rudman Winchell; the 1893 Charles Emerson House, photo courtesy of the Fish Team.

Highlights: The New England Historical Society ranks the 1911 Graham Building, rendered in yellow brick with Romanesque Revival and Beaux Arts details, as Mansur’s best commercial structure. The 1893 Charles Emerson House, on State Street, is an elegant Tudor mansion built for a dry-goods store owner.

JOHN CALVIN STEVENS

Claim to Fame: Maine’s most acclaimed architect, Stevens was a leading designer of Shingle-style homes, characterized by unpainted shingle siding, multiple gable roof lines, broad porches, abundant and varied windows, and, often, towers. Between 1880 and 1940, Stevens designed or altered more than 1,000 houses, commercial buildings, and institutions, in Portland and beyond.

History: Born in Boston and raised in Portland, Stevens joined Francis H. Fassett’s architectural firm straight out of high school, in 1873, rising from apprentice to junior partner in seven years. While managing Fassett’s short-lived Boston branch, he befriended William R. Emerson, the originator of the Shingle style. Upon returning to Portland, Stevens opened his own firm. He used formal styles for business blocks and public buildings, lending them texture with a mix of materials, like brick, glass, stone, terra cotta, and wood. His portfolio includes Portland and Biddeford city halls, public libraries in central and western Maine, waterfront hotels, country clubs, and schools. Stevens led a rich after-hours life as a landscape painter, and he was an enthusiastic cyclist who organized group rides and races. “No other Maine man helped to a greater degree to make wheeling popular,” the Portland Sunday Telegram reported, in 1903.

From left: The Charles S. Homer Jr. Cottage, photographed by Dave Clough; Winslow Homer’s home and studio, photographed by Trent Bell.

Highlights: Stevens designed scores of seaside cottages, including most of the dwellings in Cape Elizabeth’s Delano Park neighborhood; the 1901 gambrel-roofed Charles S. Homer Jr. Cottage on Scarborough’s Prouts Neck is a classic example. In 1884, Winslow Homer enlisted Stevens to convert a carriage house on Prouts Neck into a Shingle-style home and studio. It’s now owned by the Portland Museum of Art, which conducts tours there.

CHARLES G. BRYANT

Claim to Fame: Bryant is responsible for some of the best Greek Revival buildings in Bangor when it was a burgeoning lumber port, but his exploits as a militia officer and expansionist can detract from his professional accomplishments. The first housewright to advertise himself as an architect in Bangor, he courted lumber barons during the 1820s and 1830s, winning their favor not only with his designs but also his leadership in quelling a riot involving loggers and newly arrived Irish immigrants.

History: Bryant learned carpentry from his father, a Belfast shipwright. He enjoyed a robust career in Bangor until the Panic of 1837 financial crisis. A year later, after illegally crossing the international border, in upstate New York, he was arrested along with other members of a paramilitary group whose aim was to annex Canada to the U.S. He escaped and fled to Galveston, in the Republic of Texas, where he resumed his architectural career. A major in the Texas Rangers military force, he was killed in a battle with Lipan Apaches, in 1850.

From left: Bangor House, photographed by John Phelan; the 1837 Cutting-Kent duplex, photo courtesy of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission.

Highlights: Bryant’s buildings are striking for their sophistication. “There’s nothing like them anywhere else in Maine,” says Earle G. Shettleworth Jr., who unearthed Bryant’s forgotten past for The Flight of the Grand Eagle: Charles G. Bryant, Maine Architect and Adventurer. His innovative Greek Revivals include the 1837 Cutting-Kent duplex, on Penobscot Street, and the 1831 Nathaniel Hatch House, on Court Street, which has front and back temple façades. He modeled the Bangor House, which introduced luxury lodging to the city, in 1835, after Boston’s Tremont House; today it houses apartments.

EMILY MUIR

Claim to Fame: Despite having no architectural training, Deer Isle artist Emily Muir was a pioneer of modernist design in Maine. She was 57 in 1960, when she offered her first response to a spate of boxy new houses she considered discordant with their untamed coastal setting: her first Crockett Cove spec house was built of native stone and wood and configured to appear like an extension of the craggy granite on which it sat. She went on to build 29 more homes distinguished by simple lines and two full-glass façades — one facing the cove, the other Penobscot Bay. “The house has to fit the site, not dominate it,” Muir explained in her 2002 autobiography, The Time of My Life. “I leave every possible tree, even allowing some to grow through the deck.”

History: Born in Chicago and raised in New York, Muir spent childhood summers in Stonington. After marrying sculptor Bill Muir, in 1928, she designed their modest house above the Deer Island Thoroughfare, as well as their glass-walled studio, a tourist-attracting forerunner to her Crockett Cove cottages. The Muirs were instrumental in relocating the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts to Deer Isle, and Emily, an environmentalist, donated the 98-acre Crockett Cove Woods Preserve to the Nature Conservancy.

From left: The Boat House, photo courtesy of the Island Agency; the Falls at Crockett Cove, photographed by Maura McEvoy.

Highlights: Muir’s cottages are only visible from Crockett Cove. One, dubbed the Boat House, fairly clings to a cliff and operates as an Airbnb. Another, referred to as The Falls at Crockett Cove, is ensconced among spruces and was recently elegantly renovated.

GEORGE M. COOMBS

Claim to Fame: In 1908, Coombs concluded his 37-year architectural career with a flamboyant flourish: Lewiston’s Kora Temple, whose Moorish-inspired onion domes, bulbous arched entryway, and filigree-capped windows are so unlike anything else in Maine that first-time viewers often stop and gape. Coombs’s legacy extends far beyond Sabattus Street, however. His banks, churches, courthouses, factories, schools, and homes are found in 50 communities around the state.

History: As a young man, Coombs worked as a carpenter in his native Brunswick. He learned drafting from Boston architect Frederick Hamilton, then moved to Lewiston, where he collaborated with several architects, eventually settling into a partnership with William H. Stevens. The 1876 Victorian Gothic Odd Fellows Block, on Lisbon Street, is one surviving example of the Stevens & Coombs firm. After Stevens’s death, in 1880, Coombs expanded the office’s geographic and stylistic reach, working in Second Empire, Romanesque Revival, and Queen Anne styles.

From left: Lewiston’s Kora Temple; the 1889 Charles Cushman House. Photos by Dave Clough.

Highlights: Coombs designed the 1882 Dominican Block, a rare Queen Anne commercial building, in the heart of Lewiston’s Little Canada. His client was the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, which used it as a school and social center. Coombs’s residential triumph is the 1889 Charles Cushman House, in Auburn, a Queen Anne uncommonly built of fieldstone. The house is an emblem of LA’s manufacturing heyday: Cushman headed the Cushman-Hollis factory, one of the world’s largest makers of canvas shoes.

CALVIN RYDER

Claim to Fame: In the mid-19th century, when the river ports of Belfast and Winterport were experiencing unprecedented growth, businessmen showed off their wealth by building fancy homes. Ryder, one of Maine’s foremost architects of the Greek Revival style, was often their designer of choice.

History: Orrington-born Ryder’s influences include two contemporaries, Bangor architects Charles H. Pond and Charles G. Bryant. His first known commission, Winterport’s 1833 Union Meeting House, is nearly a replica of Pond’s Gothic Revival Methodist Church built the year before, in Orrington; Ryder’s 1840 Sherburne Sleeper House, in Belfast, uses features, such as its five-bay façade and simple moldings, found in several Bryant homes. Ryder came into his own as a designer, however, and architectural historians believe he is responsible for many more houses than the handful that have been documented. Around 1850, he relocated to Boston, where he worked in partnership with several architects.

From left: The 1842 James P. White House, photographed by James Hogarty; the 1844 Joseph Williamson House, photo courtesy of the Morrow family.

Highlights: Ryder’s masterpiece is one of Belfast’s largest homes, the 1842 James P. White House, built for a prominent businessman (and future mayor and state senator). Its high-style details include an elaborate octagonal cupola, a two-story entrance porch, flush board siding, and abundant carved ornamentation. Another Ryder-designed Belfast mansion, the 1844 Joseph Williamson House, resembles a Greek temple with its columned two-story portico. Ryder’s hand is also found in Bangor, where he designed and built the 1858 William Blake House, one of Maine’s earliest, and finest, Second Empire dwellings.

NICHOLAS CODD

Claim to Fame: Architectural historians know with certainty only one structure designed by Codd — that’s the 1807 St. Patrick’s Church, in Newcastle’s Damariscotta Mills, the oldest surviving Catholic house of worship in New England. They’re confident, however, that Codd is the master behind several Federal residences considered intrinsic to the stately character of Wiscasset and Damariscotta villages.

History: Codd was a housewright who moved from Ireland to Boston, around 1795, and later settled in the Newcastle area’s Irish immigrant community. Little else is known about him; even his birth date is fuzzy. His obituary puts it as 1754; his resident-alien papers say 1762. Mystery surrounds his structures as well; no plans by him have ever been found. But his St. Patrick’s commission connects him to the parish’s organizers, Irishmen James Kavanaugh and Matthew Cottrill, and to other midcoast entrepreneurs, who, historians believe, commissioned him to design their houses in that prosperous era.

From left: the James Kavanaugh House, photo courtesy of Drum and Drum Real Estate; the 1807 Nickels-Sortwell House, photographed by Susan Cole Kelly.

Highlights: “I was blown away the first time I saw the James Kavanaugh House, in Damariscotta Mills,” the best-known residence attributed to Codd, Julie Senk says. Built in 1803, “it sits on a hill as if on a pedestal. Its octagonal cupola seems almost a touch oversized. It has flush board siding, Palladian windows, and other gorgeous Federal details.” Many of these same high-style Codd signatures appear on the 1801 Cottrill House, in Damariscotta, the 1807 Nickels-Sortwell House, in Wiscasset, and the 1806 “Spite House,” which Thomas McCobb built in Phippsburg to out-dazzle the childhood home he lost in a family dispute. In 1925, it was barged to Rockport.

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By Michaela Cavallaro
Photos by Hannah Hoggatt
From the Fall 2023 issue of Maine Homes by Down East

Perched on a vintage metal kitchen stool that appears plucked from a 1950s chemistry lab, Erica Berman declared, “I don’t like new stuff.” The irony, of which she’s fully aware, is that she sits in a light-filled Newcastle home that she and her husband, Alain Ollier, built on 30 acres, in 2014 — a spring chicken by Maine housing-stock standards. But the couple, who previously lived in a 19th-century Paris apartment, went to great lengths to take the shine off the new construction, applying textural clay plaster to the heavily insulated, 12-inch-thick walls; incorporating antiques and red-oak doors and windowsills Ollier crafted from trees harvested on the property; sourcing vintage doorknobs and window latches; and laying pine floorboards salvaged from a nearby teardown. A zinc-topped kitchen island and pulley light over a pair of yard-sale dining tables nod toward Parisian styling.

Clockwise from top left: Euphorbia trigonas, a lemon plant, and whimsical tile from popham design enliven the primary bath; Moroccan cement-tile backsplash from popham design and vintage-inspired vinyl floorcloths create an intriguing constellation in the kitchen, which also features black-granite countertops from Topsham’s Morningstar Stone & Tile; in the kitchen/dining area, reclaimed pine flooring, hand-crafted oak doors and windowsills, a cupboard Berman picked up in Boston during her college years, and yard-sale tables inject warmth.

The couple bought the property in 2012, after moving to the area from Ollier’s native France, where Berman founded a luxury-vacation-rental company. She’d grown up visiting South Bristol and had been enamored of the midcoast ever since. The neglected wooded lot they found offered so much potential that Berman calls it their “lifetime project.” First up: the house they largely designed themselves, prioritizing an open floor plan. “This is where everything happens,” said Ollier, a high-school French and Spanish teacher, gesturing around the airy kitchen/dining/living area. To limit visual clutter, the windows and closets have no trim —“that drove our builder over the edge” — Berman says — and the kitchen- window sashes are set high, allowing for unobstructed views while cooking. Off the living room, a heated sun porch provided safe lodging for guests during the pandemic and its flat roof serves as a second-floor deck.

Upstairs offers two bedrooms, a second full bath, and an office/sitting area — more square footage than the couple needed, due to the design of the first floor. “We wanted the space downstairs,” Ollier says, noting that a substantially smaller upper story would have dictated forms they didn’t like. “You’d have a Saltbox or maybe an A-frame,” he says. However, the extra rooms have come in handy since Berman founded Veggies to Table, a nonprofit farm that grows 85 types of organic produce and flowers that get donated to local food pantries, schools, and summer lunch programs, in 2019. In spring, much of the home becomes a de facto greenhouse, complete with grow lights and a troupe of employees and volunteers traipsing through when it’s time to transplant the seedlings.

Clockwise from top left: Berman’s nonprofit, Veggies to Table, grows organic food and flowers on-site for donation to food pantries, schools, and other organizations across Lincoln County; Ollier and Berman largely designed their cedar-shingled home themselves, incorporating personal details like a porch nook for stacked wood and foundation cladding made from granite excavated during building; the season’s produce bounty often overflows into the home.

The garden the couple planted in their early years here now covers three-quarters of an acre and its bounty sometimes spills over into the downstairs living space, alongside the begonias, Chinese money plants, and massive euphorbia trigonas that thrive in the south-facing kitchen and living room. Over the last few years, they’ve added a cold-storage building, an outdoor kitchen for staff and volunteers, and three raised wooden platforms where long-term volunteers can set up camp.

Still, Berman looks forward to the day when all farm tasks happen outside the cedar-shingled walls of her home, when she can spend more time relaxing in one of the antique Bergère armchairs she had upholstered in soft gray and blue and gaze out past the elm that towers protectively near the house, to the land she and Ollier have cultivated so carefully. “I really wanted to make sure that our farm was not only efficient and productive, but beautiful too,” Berman says. “We take great joy in looking out at it.”

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On the coast and in the woods, in subdivisions and in former summer communities, Maine houses are becoming tighter, cleaner, and, in some cases, nearly or fully self-sustaining. Here, we introduce you to five sets of owners who took different routes to realizing a high-performing home without compromising on dream features, be it a “Harry Potter room” or a bath designed for luxuriating — and dog washing.

House Hunting

For more than a decade, a Portland couple and a Boston couple who are longtime friends (and asked that their names be withheld) dreamed of owning a place together in Phippsburg, where they’d spent many vacations. Then, on the same day in 2017, both camps emailed each other a listing for a three-acre ledgy parcel on Sebasco Harbor. After one visit, they made an offer. The existing cottage was rotted through, so the group set about designing a new, sustainable retreat with Portland architect Eric Sokol. Investing in efficient features, such as geothermal heat pumps that move heat from the ground into the home, triple-glazed windows, and 12-inch-thick walls filled with cellulose insulation, was a no-brainer, the Portland wife says. “Because we were sharing the cost, it was like everything was half off!”

Treading Lightly

“You can make the land conform to the house or the house can conform to the land,” says Sokol, who leaned hard in the latter direction, bending the building around the existing ledge to avoid blasting. A single story, save a projected loft that beams in southerly light, the home hunkers on its hilltop and ushers in water views with expansive glazing, including a 16-foot-wide slider in the dining space. Half-inch-thick cedar shingles (more durable than standard 5/16–inch-thick ones) will weather to the gray of the rocks and, soon, a planted roof will provide additional insulation while feathering the structure into the surrounding trees.

Team Effort

The Portland wife and Boston husband served as the point people on the project, working with Sokol and Phippsburg contractor R.W. Stevens to select materials, such as locally sourced pine paneling in a relatively knot-free premium grade for a modern look and recycled-paper countertops. If you’re going to build with friends (and stay on speaking terms), “you need to distill it down to one or two decision makers to remove as much complexity as you can,” the Boston husband says. Flexibility is also key. Case in point: The Boston couple was set on concrete flooring, while the Portlanders wanted wood. The Mainers capitulated, but the concrete got damaged during installation and they wound up putting reclaimed elm on top. “We ended up going with their plan, but they were willing to give in for us,” the Boston husband says. And they all remain great friends.

Architect: Winkelman Architecture
General Contractor: R.W. Stevens
Square Feet: 1,800
Bedrooms: 3
Baths: 1 1⁄2
Heat/Electricity: Geothermal heat pumps, HearthStone woodstove, backup propane generator, wired for future solar panels
Annual Cost for Heat/Electricity: $2,500

Cross-Country Collab

Four years ago, Kay and Alicia (who asked that their surnames be withheld) were pondering a return to Maine from San Diego, when Alicia saw a Maine Homes story about eco-friendly subdivisions. One, in Cumberland, developed by builder Patrice Cappelletti and architect Emily Mottram, would eventually comprise five net-zero or net-zero-ready houses that generate, or are capable of generating, more energy than they consume in a year. “I thought, isn’t it marvelous that it’s a woman architect and builder?” Alicia says. “And this seems like it should be the standard for the way things are built.” She emailed Cappelletti to applaud her work, and the two struck up a long-distance friendship. Then the last lot in the Cumberland development unexpectedly became available. Cappelletti offered it to Kay and Alicia, who bought it sight unseen. Over the next year, they worked over Zoom with Cappelletti and Mottram, who have since formed the Cumberland design-build firm The Nesting Ground, to conceive their home. “I’m a nurse and Kay’s a doctor,” Alicia says. “We like to know, down to the letter, what we’re doing. So this was a weird leap of faith.”

Photos by Dave Waddell

New Traditional

When Cappelletti and Mottram began collaborating, in 2015, “I felt like energy-efficient houses were getting a bad rap because they were all super-modern,” Mottram says. By contrast, Kay and Alicia’s place resembles a classic farmhouse with contemporary flair, expressed in the trimless, grilleless, triple-glazed windows and mix of vertical, thermally modified spruce siding, which resists rot and pests, horizontal hemlock clapboards (mounted rough side out for texture and better paint adhesion), and cedar shingles. Inside, Cappelletti used an antique hemlock beam and fireplace surround in the kitchen/living area, vintage interior windows, and beadboard and nickel-gap paneling atop 10 1⁄2-inch-thick, cellulose-filled walls to “build character.”

Marrying Styles

“I have a clean, Scandinavian aesthetic and Kay’s more British maximalist,” Alicia says. They compromised (sort of) by juxtaposing sleek furnishings and muted shades with a few of Kay’s choices, such as a delft-tile kitchen backsplash depicting woodland creatures and folk-art-inspired floor tile fronting a luxurious cast-iron soaking tub in the upstairs bath. One spot that’s all Kay’s: a little slanted study, dubbed “the Harry Potter room,” furnished with an antique mahogany sea-captain’s desk, reproduction portraits of 19th-century dukes and a young Vanderbilt, and a Victorian-era cast-iron fireplace surround. “Emily wouldn’t let us have a working fireplace because it would make too many holes in the house,” Kay says with a laugh.

Architect/General Contractor: The Nesting Ground
Square Feet: 2,562
Bedrooms: 4
Baths: 2 1⁄2
Heat/Electricity: Air-source heat pumps, Mørso woodstove, radiant bath flooring, 8.04kW solar array, backup solar batteries
Annual Cost for Heat/Electricity: $409

Community Spirit

In the early 20th century, day trippers and summer residents rode a trolley from Portland to Cumberland Foreside’s Wildwood Park neighborhood, composed of some 60 cottages, a restaurant/inn, and a sandy beach that winds along Broad Cove. Last spring, Joanne and Jim Berg drove their plug-in hybrid car from Arizona to their new place on one of those summerhouse plots. The move, their 12th in 44 years of marriage, brought them closer to their two adult children, both of whom have settled in Maine, and is meant to be their last. Their goal: “to live in a low-energy-use place, made of good, sturdy materials, with no drafts,” Joanne says. The fact that they also landed in what is now a close-knit, year-round community with a lively trick-or-treating scene “makes us feel incredibly lucky.”

Old Meets New

The Bergs’s place comprised a 1918 carriage house, used as living quarters, and a connected 2000 cottage with a cathedral ceiling of exposed timber framing they loved. Working with Portland architect Harry Hepburn and builder Dan Kolbert, they opted to preserve the cottage’s shell (and pine flooring to repurpose on screened-porch and portico ceilings) and continue its soaring living-room ceiling into the kitchen, housed in a new rear bump-out. Clad in pale cedar clapboards, the reimagined cottage provides a foil for a two-story addition of charcoal-stained cedar, erected where the unsalvageable carriage house had been. “They didn’t want it to feel like a big house, so this was a way to break down the scale and help it blend with the landscape,” Hepburn says of the yin-yang approach.

Weighing Options

From a cost perspective, reusing the existing structure versus building new “was probably a wash,” says Kolbert, whose crew had to reconstruct the original cottage’s floor framing and insulate the foundation. “But we saved a fair amount of concrete, which is often the highest single element in the ‘carbon budget.’” And the Bergs wound up with the tight, toasty house they sought, thanks to 11-inch-thick walls stuffed with cellulose insulation and triple-glazed windows, many of them trained on the cove and 23 acres of wooded conservation land. “My dream was to sit in our living room, look out the window at the snow, and be cozy,” Joanne says. A few months before moving here full-time, “I lived that dream on Christmas.”

Architect: Briburn
General Contractor: Kolbert Building
Square Feet: 1,904
Bedrooms: 3
Baths: 2
Heat/Electricity: Air-source heat pumps, Rais gas stove, wired for future solar panels
Annual Cost for Heat/ Electricity: Not available yet

Semi-Custom Design

After purchasing their 20-acre wooded Kennebunkport lot, in 2019, Lisa Condit and Dan Macauley faced long lead times from architects versed in sustainable design. An efficient modular home would go up faster, but the large components couldn’t be trucked in on their narrow dirt road. Finally, they landed on a prefab plan they could customize and build on-site. Over six months, Jessica Benner, senior project coordinator at Portland’s BrightBuilt Home, worked with the couple to expand the company’s farmhouse-esque Cushing model, tweak the layout, and tack on a garage and lofty, ipe-clad, three-season porch. Going the semi-custom route, rather than starting from scratch, delivered the green features Condit and Macauley were after — 11-inch-thick walls packed with cellulose insulation, triple-glazed windows, net-zero capability — while saving tens of thousands of dollars in design fees.

Built to Last

“To us, sustainability also means not having to renovate in 10 years,” says Condit, who worked with Benner and Kennebunk high-performance builders Christi and Kurt Hissong to spec hyper-durable materials, such as aluminum roofing, cedar clapboards, concrete flooring, ipe decking, and German-made Bulthaup walnut and aluminum kitchen cabinetry. The gabled exterior harmonizes with the rural landscape, while the streamlined interior is timeless and adaptable — a second-floor hangout space, for example, could easily be walled off to become a bedroom — and light on fussy details. “We didn’t do a lot of built-ins because every time I watch a design show they are the first things people tear out,” Condit says.

Pet-Friendly Features

To facilitate life with furry friends, and minimize allergens and pollutants, Condit and Macauley stash their cats’ litter boxes in a nook beneath the stairs outfitted with a sliding door and a vent tied into their air-circulation system. The glassed-in wet room in their bath has an egg-shaped soaking tub for luxuriating in, and an attached wand for dog washing; additional wands beneath the room’s dual showerheads are used to spray fur off the walls and floor. Pups can also rinse off in the ipe-clad outdoor shower and dine at an ergonomic height, thanks to dishes installed on a raised bracket in the kitchen.

Architect: BrightBuilt Home
General Contractor: Proper Modern Home
Square Feet: 3,075
Bedrooms: 3
Baths: 2 1⁄2
Heat/Electricity: Ducted and air-source heat pumps, Hase woodstove, radiant bath flooring, backup propane generator, solar-panel installation in September
Annual Cost for Heat/Electricity: $4,359

Kitchen Goals

“We had great views, but we were looking at cabinets,” says Neil Gilbert, referring to the kitchen in the 1995 Colonial-style house on Scarborough’s Grondin Pond that he and his wife, Virginia, purchased in 2015. They enlisted residential designer Rachel Conly and contractor Heather Thompson, who have since formed Portland’s Juniper Design + Build with partner Mark Pollard, to reorient and modernize the space, outfitted with dark wood cabinetry and a single, small window. In the process, they decided to knock down walls and create an expansive kitchen/dining/living area with a 22-foot-long stretch of water-facing, triple-paned glass, housed in a little bump-out that opens onto a tiered cedar deck. Upstairs, they renovated a pair of bedrooms and baths and moved the primary suite to a room above the garage. “Once they were here, it made sense to do it all and make things more energy efficient,” Virginia says.

Thoughtful Approach

“There’s a new philosophy in renovating that it’s often better to electrify a house and do the best you can with air sealing than to do a gut renovation,” Thompson says. “There’s a carbon and financial cost in materials, so let’s focus on the areas where you can have the most impact and save money.” In addition to installing heat pumps, the Juniper team replaced much of the home’s siding with radiata pine clapboards mounted atop a weather-resistant air barrier and five-and-a-half inches of dense-pack cellulose insulation; swapped all the windows for triple-glazed versions; and added wall and ceiling air barriers between the garage and living spaces to prevent carbon monoxide from seeping into the house. “In the early days of green building, they called an attached garage the Kevorkian option,” Pollard says.

Clever Design

Conly set off the rear-kitchen and front-entry bump-outs with stained hemlock clapboards, giving them modern presence, designed a new stairwell to the primary suite with artful shafts of recessed LED strip lighting on the walls, and conceived a water-facing pickled-oak headboard for the couple with an integrated porcelain gas-fireplace surround and a walnut-topped storage bench on the opposing side. In winter, the Gilberts switch on that fireplace, or light the existing wood-burning one in the living room, for ambiance. Not because they’re actually chilly. “Our furnace used to stay on pretty much all the time,” Neil says. “Last winter, we barely turned on the heat.”

Architect/General Contractor: Juniper Design + Build
Square Feet: 4,605
Bedrooms: 4
Baths: 4 1⁄2 baths
Heat/Electricity: Air-source heat pumps, gas and wood-burning fireplaces, radiant bath flooring, supplemental electric baseboards and oil furnace
Annual Cost for Heat/Electricity: $7,800

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By Sarah Stebbins
Photos by Rachel Sieben
From our October 2023 issue

When real-estate agent David Marsden first saw the 1951 Portland ranch he shares with his wife, artist Honour Mack, he thought, “This is a fun house.” As he took in the living room’s orange shag carpet, lime-green velvet sectional, and walnut Hi-Fi cabinet with built-in bar, Marsden says, “I could see myself in that era with a martini, hanging out.” Adapted from plans in Better Homes & Gardens for Dr. Albert and Golde Aaronson (whose Twiggy-esque cocktail dresses still hung in a bedroom closet when Mack and Marsden visited), the low-slung home, with its wall of south-facing windows, was an outlier in a Rosemont neighborhood of early-20th-century Colonial-style dwellings. “I give the Aaronsons so much credit for taking a chance on something totally avant-garde,” Mack says. Even if the place was a tad groovy for her taste: “There’s almost nothing we haven’t touched.” Their latest project? A kitchen revamp with sleek white cabinetry that nods to their original metal, juxtaposed with a matte-black workstation. “It’s not a Hi-Fi cabinet,” Mack says, “but Dave got his bar.”

Kitchen

Working with Portland architect Michael Charek and builder-turned-ceramicist Tim McMahon, Mack and Marsden maximized storage (and contrast) in their compact kitchen with a wall of black and white laminate cabinetry. A leathered-granite backsplash and countertops from Stone Surface, in Naples, and an artful relief-tile backsplash from Portland’s Distinctive Tile & Design play up the yin-yang palette, while a vaulted ceiling adds airiness.

Dining Area

Mack, whose architect father studied with renowned modernist architect Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania, has long been enamored of boundary-pushing, mid-century design. “I wanted something that was not a cookie-cutter, normal house,” she says. The Aaronsons’ entry/dining area, with its soaring stone chimney and petrified-wood floor, was a clue she’d found it. A painting of Mack’s grandmother (and namesake) hangs on the masonry, which lends its palette to the furnishings, including the Aaronsons’ sideboard and table, a painting by Mack, and a wool rug and cherry armchairs by Portland’s Angela Adams and Sherwood Hamill, respectively.

Sunroom

When the overhang crowning the living-room windows shades the summer sun, the couple camps out in this bright, three-season, 1970s addition, furnished with a mid-century woodstove, a sofa purchased with the house and slipcovered in IKEA fabric, Mack’s great-grandparents’ loveseats, and lamps from Portland Flea-For-All. The artwork, a vintage toolbox with an illuminated collaged panel, is by her former student Robert Doane.

Den

Mack loves the home’s precipitous birch-plywood paneling, “but there’s only so much we can take.” When she surveys a room, “I’m looking at a painting; if there’s too much of one color, the balance is off.” In the den, originally Dr. Aaronson’s office, she coated one plywood wall in high-gloss black — “the sheen makes it not so stark,” Marsden says — and swapped tangerine carpeting for FLOR carpet tiles that conjure an op-art painting.

Bath

Marsden fondly remembers the original bath, outfitted with a mint-green toilet, tub, wall tile, and laminate flooring and polka-dot metallic wallpaper. And he recalls the record-scratch moment when Mack declared, “This is going!” while tearing off a strip of wallpaper. But both parties are happy with Mack’s soothing reimagining of the space with floor-to-ceiling subway tile, a marble countertop, and seaglass-like pebble floor tile — “my nod to the green bathroom,” she says.

Exterior

“We’ve run into people who grew up around here and said they used to call the house ‘the hotdog stand’” on account of its former red clapboards and white stucco, says Mack, whose first order of business was repainting the cladding a camouflaging, earthy green. She’s been picking away at projects ever since. “In my studio, the way a painting evolves, it’s a slow, cumulative experience. And that’s how I think of the house and gardens. It’s a visual experience I’m constantly experimenting with.”

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“There was nothing hospitable about it, but it spoke to me,” says Mandy Lamb, reflecting on her decision, in 2017, to purchase a former hydroelectric powerhouse in Norridgewock, complete with boarded-up windows, peeling lead paint, and a rotten subfloor. “I could see the potential of the place, fully realized in my head, as soon as I saw it.”

Built in 1904 on the bank of the Sandy River, the powerhouse was decommissioned in 2006 and sat vacant under private ownership until Lamb came along. “I’ve always been drawn to Grange and Odd Fellows halls, utility and community buildings, and waterfront was important to me,” says Lamb, a photographer and commercial fisherwoman. “And you could tell a lot of care was put into the construction of the building.” Perched on a foundation of hulking granite blocks, with soaring 12-over-12 windows arrayed in decorative inset brick panels anchored with stone sills, it is remarkably elegant for a place that began life as a receptacle for heavy machinery.

The earlier removal of a water turbine may have damaged the building’s wood flooring, which Lamb had to clear out, along with a 14-ton generator that was hoisted by crane through a hatch in the roof. Afterward, she and her friends tackled renovations in between her months-long fishing expeditions. They pressure-washed green and orange lead paint from the 19-foot-tall interior walls and ceiling and coated them in gallery white; repaired the subfloor and installed radiant heat beneath a new concrete floor; installed a streamlined kitchen with a refrigerator and freezer tucked beneath marble countertops; and sectioned off a bath with shiplap pony walls. Pros plumbed and wired the place, restored the nine original windows, and hung the pine front doors, salvaged from a 19th-century Biddeford mill.

Furnishings inspired by the Shaker Village in Lamb’s hometown of Harvard, Massachusetts, including a pine kitchen island Biddeford’s Steve Ryder built from century-old timbers that had supported the powerhouse’s generator, a simple, trapezoidal bed Lamb crafted from plywood, and a wall of marigold-painted IKEA cabinetry in the bath, mingle with a smattering of antiques that read like conversation pieces in the spare, open plan. “I like the house on the empty side, but I didn’t want it to feel cold,” Lamb says. “The antiques give it some warmth without the clutter that’s usually associated with that kind of aesthetic.”

Most days, the only sound here is the churn of the river and the birdsong from its overgrown banks. The closest house is barely visible across a broad cornfield. For Lamb, it’s the opposite of her life at sea, on a commercial trawler with three dozen fishers working long, loud, strenuous days. The two almost balance each other, she figures. Except, “I never feel like I have quite enough time at home.”

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Last year, Boston entrepreneur Josh Johnson’s search for a vacation home led him to an off-grid concrete dome on 42 wooded acres in Kennebunkport. “I really wanted it,” he says. “I saw, obviously, that it would be a great Airbnb, but I also knew it was a really special place that I could keep forever and that would give me purpose.”

Johnson considered more conventional retreats in northern New England before falling for this inhabitable “piece of art,” built in 2003 by sculptor Daphne Pulsifer with input from Texas’s Monolithic Dome Institute, which promotes the energy-efficient concrete forms. A visitor finds the dome via Road to Misery, a rough access way through dense forest named, Johnson was told, for the hassle Pulsifer and her family endured clearing it. The road terminates at a roundabout beside a rocky pasture and Pulsifer’s sculpture, rising from a granite ledge like a giant gray gumdrop. “It’s not very pretty from the outside,” admits Johnson, who plans to paint it. “One person on Facebook described it as a bunker.”

An Airbnb reviewer described Josh Johnson’s concrete Kennebunkport home as “a monolithic dome” with “a tidbit of a New England cottage,” noting that the interior “somehow feels expansive and cozy at the same time.” Hand-crafted details include balustrades, posts, and beams fashioned from the property’s trees; ruddy porcelain floor tiles inlaid with a compass rose; and a 12-foot-long steel pot rack on the curved kitchen wall.

But the interior is sun-drenched and cheerful, with 12-foot-tall windows punctuating mottled sprayed-concrete walls and artful accents made by Pulsifer and her husband, Daniel Bates: balustrades, posts, and beams of bark-stripped trees harvested during the road clearing, Tolkienesque oak and pine doors with geometric glass inlays, and a 12-foot-long steel pot rack that curves along the kitchen wall. “You’re so amazed by everything that you don’t necessarily notice that this is an off-grid structure and how am I going to heat it in the winter when I’m not here?” Johnson says, recalling his initial tour.

Since buying the place, he’s tried to make it more functional without compromising its charm. He installed a propane furnace in the basement to supplement the kitchen’s woodstove, put in a new kitchen range, and repainted soot-darkened walls bright white for a “modern Mediterranean vibe.” (One Airbnb reviewer compared the effect to “being on the inside of an egg.” She gave the dome five stars.)

Recently, Johnson added a second-floor powder room with a built-in vanity finished in undulating concrete that blends with the rest of the interior. “I’m trying to do things right,” he says. “But an artist literally built this. It’s kind of intimidating to have that to live up to.”

From $275/night. airbnb.com/h/the-dome-home

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Marcia Pond Anderson began her quest to save Patten’s 1845 Regular Baptist Church with a simple plea. During a meeting of the town select board, held after it approved demolition of the neglected structure last year, she protested, “That is the most important historic building we have. If you tear it down, you will never have that again.” Built by Patten’s founding residents, with a trompe l’oeil ceiling, the church was a meeting spot for a volunteer militia that later served in the Union Army. The town purchased it in 1928, and it housed the Veteran’s Memorial Library until 2020; in 1958, the central arched windows were replaced with stained glass. Pond Anderson’s entreaty bought some time, which she used to form a preservation committee that gathered signatures in favor of conveying the church to the Patten Historical Society (founded by Pond Anderson) and compelled a town vote. Last spring, residents approved the measure 82 to 5. “There were roadblocks, but you keep going,” Pond Anderson says. “I don’t believe in the word ‘can’t.’”

How did you get involved in preservation?

When I was in sixth grade, the schools consolidated and middle-schoolers started going to Patten Academy, a beautiful 1898 structure. In 1975, they tore it down, which was so sad. One day, a friend and I noticed a room with trophies, photographs of graduating students, and other history from the high school. I thought, something has to be done. So I went to librarian Katherine Rogers at the Veteran’s Memorial Library and asked if we could bring them there. She agreed, and we boxed up all we could.

Exterior photo courtesy of Marcia Pond Anderson

How did the Patten Historical Society start?

We were losing buildings, and I realized we needed a presence to inform people and say, ‘This is enough.’ Several years after I started it, in 1986, I noticed the early-20th-century former home of Katherine Rogers and Dr. Lore Rogers, who started the Patten Lumbermen’s Museum, had spray-painted numbers on it. I went to the town office and learned the town had acquired the building and firefighters were practicing putting out fires there. I said, ‘You can’t let this happen,’ and we were able to get the house transferred to the historical society.

What’s your connection to the church?

As schoolchildren, walking into the library in the church was like entering another world — there was a Civil War uniform, a replica of Queen Nefertiti’s bust, textiles from Peru. As an adult going in to get a book or do research, sitting on one of the original benches (now at the historical society), you knew that they were special. People have said to me, ‘That was my safe place’ or ‘That’s where I learned about the Civil War.’ There’s such a deep love for that building and what it stood for.

What’s next?

We need to replace the roof and repair the foundation; we’re slowly exposing the painted ceiling and seeing what condition it’s in. Our goal is to preserve the historical integrity and repurpose the building for the community and future generations, maybe with concerts, art shows, poetry readings. There are a lot of talented people in Patten and what they have in common is their heart. Their heart is in this, and it means a lot to them.

To donate to the church restoration, contact the Patten Historical Society at 207-267-0720 or pondie3@gmail.com.

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In the 1980s, Charlie Lopresti grew pumpkins in the garden with his dad. Their biggest was about 200 pounds. A couple of decades later, Lopresti and his wife settled in rural Buxton, with plenty of yard for planting. In 2016, he set a goal: to grow a 2,000-pound pumpkin. Lopresti, who’s chief meteorologist at Portland’s CBS and Fox affiliates, came close in 2019. Last year, he had another promising candidate. “I didn’t go to the beach once all summer,” he says. “I was busy in the pumpkin patch, out there on my hands and knees, spraying fertilizers and fish emulsions. It’s a weird obsession.”

Good soil and strong pedigree are prerequisite — growers often share seeds. When the plant’s female flower blooms, Lopresti hand-delivers pollen from the plant’s male flower, then ties the female flower shut to keep out free-ranging pollinators. Weather is also key. A heating cable in the soil combats the cold. A wind fence defends against storm projectiles. Too much rain invites fungal infections. Too much sun damages the flesh. Despite so many hazards, Lopresti’s pumpkin gained about 54 pounds per day in a two week period last year. And at the Damariscotta Pumpkinfest & Regatta, he came out on top: 2,080 pounds, only about 40 shy of the state record.

This year, Lopresti took a break from jumbo pumpkins and hasn’t made up his mind about the future, but he doesn’t talk as if he’s hanging up his fish-emulsion sprayer forever. “This is one of the silliest things,” he says. “We have so much structure in our lives — going to work, paying bills. Sometimes, you just have to do something that makes no sense.”

Catch Lopresti emceeing pumpkin weigh-ins on October 1 at the Louis Doe Home Center, in Newcastle, for this year’s Damariscotta Pumpkinfest & Regatta, which takes place the following weekend.

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