“Camps used to be simple,” says Mark Gordon, founder of Rangeley Building and Remodeling. “The overall quality of a camp has changed.” While he notes that there was certainly a boom period during the early 1900s (“A lot of great camps went up in that 25-year period because of all the sportsmen coming north,” he says), this didn’t last. For much of the twentieth century, the buildings going up around the Rangeley Lakes region were simple, functional things—four walls and (ideally) a metal roof. But times have changed, and Mark and his team have changed with them. “Now we have the opportunity to really choose our clients and select who we want to work with,” he says. Jill Gordon, designer for Rangeley Building and Remodeling, adds that this selectivity isn’t about style—it’s about ethos. “I never want people to walk into a space and be like, ‘Oh, Rangeley Building and Remodeling built this.’ I want it to feel fresh, like it was designed and built for the client.” She continues, “We live in this town. We want to be able to see people at the IGA and have a good talk about the project.”

The company is a true family affair: it was founded by Mark and is currently headed by the couple. Someday, they hope to pass it down to their sons, and they make a point of hiring children of employees to further support their local community. Although they’ve been in business for nearly 30 years, Rangeley Building and Remodeling hasn’t always done business the way they do today. From the beginning, they’ve worked with a range of budgets and clients, and they’ve always prioritized quality over quantity in their builds, but in the beginning they didn’t prepare quite so meticulously. According to Mark, they now do more planning, budgeting, and pricing “up front” than most builders, which gives the client (and their in-house team) time to really wrap their heads around what will be required of them. “We didn’t just come up with this process off the top of our heads,” he explains. “We joined a peer group.”

Back in 2016, Mark and Jill joined hundreds of other builders and remodelers as members of Remodelers Advantage. During their biannual meetings, the members would break into small groups of similarly sized companies. “You sit together in a room for three days,” says Mark, “and you open up everything about your company.” Jill adds, “We talk about our finances, personal issues, everything. Everyone can benefit from the solutions you come up with.” While they’re no longer active in the group, Mark credits these experiences as being “incredibly enlightening.” “It changed how we do things,” he says. “It reduced so much stress.”

Now, with every build, Mark spends an hour coming up with an initial budget that is not designed to make the clients sign up, but rather to give them a realistic idea of what to expect. While some people have sticker shock, Mark says it’s much better to have that happen early on rather than mid-build. Once they’ve settled on an initial budget and signed a design contract, Jill gets to work on the design and Mark begins creating the set price. “We create the entire floor plan, elevation, all the interior elevations. We draw all the cabinets. We spec everything. The cabinet knobs, the paint colors. All those things happen before we sign a construction contract with clients,” says Jill. “We spend hundreds of hours on this stage,” Mark says. Together, they price out every element, from the faucets to the cabinets, which they then order and store in the 5,000-square-foot company shop. “There’s nothing like designing everything around a lovely fixture, but when you go to order it, it’s no longer available,” Jill says. A month before breaking ground, Mark makes sure that everyone, from the carpenter to the client, has a deep level of familiarity with the designs. “It helps us sleep at night, too,” says Jill. “You never want to go to bed knowing you’re going to drop a bomb on a client the next day.”

This shift in strategy has enabled the company to thrive, grow, and expand. It’s also helped them home in on the type of work they want to do. Take, for example, a recent job on the shores of Rangeley Lake. “There were two buildings, both built in the 1930s,” Jill explains. “Restoring those, for a young couple with a growing family, is one of those projects we just feel so good about. We were able to preserve the old buildings and give them longevity.” To keep the character of the structures intact, they removed the pine edge and center bead boards and put them into storage while they rebuilt the underlying walls. They were also able to save the Douglas fir floors and the entire porch (save for the windows, which needed an upgrade). While they couldn’t save the fireplace, they were able to put in a replica. “Mark is on the history museum board in Rangeley,” adds Jill. “We’re both huge old house lovers, and it’s so important to us that these places persist.”

On the other end of the spectrum is a place they refer to as the “Modern Camp.” Like the 1930s restoration, the clients for this project live year-round in Maine and wanted a place where they could escape into the woods. “This one was so fun because they were adventurous,” says Jill. Inspired by the homeowners’ collection of vintage Tupperware, Jill brought in a playful color palette of burnt orange and pine green, which echoes throughout the house and is used on wallpaper, light fixtures, and statement chairs. “During staging for photography, we used a record player that I borrowed,” she reveals. “I sent them pictures as I was working, and they went and bought their own record player so they could set it up in the living room!”

It’s this type of lighthearted and inspiring client communication that Rangeley Building and Remodeling values most. “At the end of a project, we want to have a great relationship,” says Jill. “We’re friends with a lot of the people we work for. We go back and work for them again. We get referrals from them. They know us, and they know our team.”