Camden is full of transplants, people who fell in love with Maine on vacation and bought property with the hope of summering then retiring on the coast.

The Chicago couple who decided to renovate an 1880 New England–style home on Chestnut Street, near Penobscot Bay, are no different in that. Nor are they perhaps different in seeking out local talent to complete their project. They didn’t even have to cross town borders to find their general contractor, Maine Coast Construction, or their architect, Peter Gross. They went only slightly farther afield—west to Bath—to find the Kennebec Company, which crafted the cabinetry for their kitchen, dining room, butler’s bar, and bedroom vanity. It might, indeed, have been a Maine house through and through if the renovation hadn’t been interrupted by illness. Just two months after closing on their second Chestnut Street home—the homeowners briefly lived at a different house on the same street—the husband began to feel unwell. Tests revealed he had non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and rather than stay in Maine, the couple returned to Chicago for treatment. This is when a project that might have been solely about Maine craftsmanship became a long-distance collaboration.

“I call it our email house,” says the wife of the couple, referring to the principal method of communication that she used to stay in touch with the builders. The 130-year-old house had an addition built in 1995 that included two master-bedroom suites on the ground floor. Rather than keep those rooms, the new homeowners decided to build a substantial kitchen with an informal dining room and bar. Upstairs, the existing bedrooms were reconfigured and remodeled, incorporating what had formerly been attic space.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, when the husband felt well enough for excursions, the homeowners explored Merchandise Mart, Chicago’s largest wholesale design center. Eventually, the couple focused on Ann Sacks Tile & Stone, a provider of luxury tiles, stone, and plumbing. Under the guidance of sales associate Jill Van Matre, the homeowners selected a variety classic items for their Camden home, including tile mosaics and fixtures that are reminiscent of those used in vintage 1930s-era New York apartment houses (this latter from Kallista’s Michael S. Smith Collection). But Van Matre guided the homeowners to more contemporary items as well. They decided to tile the wall of a downstairs powder room with stream pebbles and to pattern an upstairs shower with thin strips of vertical stone that resemble bamboo.

As work in Maine continued, the wife got a call saying it was time to select paint colors. She started coming home from her office (she then worked as an attorney) with paint samples, but she soon began to feel overwhelmed with the number of choices and the need to do everything long distance. She said to her husband, “This is crazy. We need some help.” Not long after, Chicago-based interior designer Jessie Davidson entered the picture. “I had never worked with a designer before, and I was a little intimidated about bringing someone into this project,” says the wife. “I stumbled onto her on the Web as someone who had an affiliation with fabric that I had bought in Italy.” (At the time, Davidson was an importer of Busatti linens and cottons.) The wife told Davidson that she not only needed help with paint colors, but that her nephew was getting married in seven months, and she hoped to have the house ready for visitors. Davidson jumped right in, making a plan to visit Maine.

Davidson’s job was to help the homeowners with drapery, rugs, light fixtures, furniture, and paint selection. To do this, Davidson asked the couple to use Post-it notes to flag favorite images in books and magazines, as well as in volumes of work from Parish-Hadley and Colefax and Fowler, the two design firms that Davidson calls “the gods of decorating in the United States and England.”

“I wouldn’t consider myself a classic, traditional designer,” Davidson says, “because I like to shake it up a little. But I also like to start with good bones and build from that.” Davidson’s expertise and tastes worked well with the Camden couple’s predilections and the wife’s love of subtle color. After her initial trip to Maine, Davidson secured blueprints from the architect and started building interiors, designing floor plans from afar, and deciding which of the pieces the
homeowners currently owned were going to end up in the new home. After the major decisions were made, the work became a process of agreeing on fabrics and colors, buying some things and making others, including several upholstered pieces of Davidson’s own design. One of the upstairs bedrooms in the Camden house features the Martin Chair—a design inspired by a French chair that Davidson saw at an antique show in Atlanta. Two of Davidson’s Kati Chairs with turned legs and casters are in the kitchen. In general, Davidson’s designs derive from her sense that “most furniture on the market today is huge, so there is a need for smaller chairs and sofas.” As for the untraditional: for the living room, Davidson purchased a vintage wicker chair from E.L. Higgins, an antique wicker dealer in Southwest Harbor. “If everything is brand new out of the show room,” Davidson says, “it doesn’t look like anyone lives there. You need something funky and unpredictable.” She also helped the homeowners select various custom rugs. The process, Davidson explains, starts with picking colors from “poms,” or little wads of yarn, that rug manufacturers then use to make a “strike-off,” a two-foot square rug sample that clients put on the floor to see if the colors work or not. Sometimes clients go through two or three strike-offs before a rug is actually made.

When the Camden house was completed and the husband’s cancer in remission, the homeowners hired a caterer to give the kitchen “its first workout,” as the wife says. They threw a thank-you party so the various contractors, subcontractors, and contributors could meet each other. Davidson and Van Matre flew in from Chicago, while the team from the Kennebec Company drove from Bath. The architect and builders were in attendance, and so were the electricians, painters, tile setters, and others.

“When we moved to Maine, people always said, ‘You are either from here or away,’” says the wife. “We thought this whole experience with the house blew that notion out of the water. Here we had wonderful Maine people, and they couldn’t have worked better with the people from away.”