April 2010

by Rebecca Falzano
Photography Scott Dorrance

One couple, two homes, twenty-five years of art

Night has fallen in Cape Elizabeth, making it nearly impossible to locate the home. Shadows swallow house numbers. The absence of streetlights produces nothing but a sea of black ahead. Then, beyond the cul-de-sac, she beckons: the striking face of a woman through a second-story window. From the street, the glowing Brett Bigbee portrait (of his wife, Ann) offers a clue to the artistic bounty within.

When faced with the abundance of art inside, it is hard to imagine that this is only half the collection. The rest is housed in a weekend cottage tucked away in a quiet waterfront enclave in Cape Porpoise. While the two homes are strikingly different (the Cape Porpoise is small, white, intensely stark, while the Cape Elizabeth is roomy, colorful, rich), both easily rival some of the best gallery spaces in Maine.

The sprawling private collection is the culmination of one couple’s twenty-five-year love affair with art—a joyful hobby (at times, obsession) that, over time, has been carefully cultivated by travel, the pages of magazines, gallery trips, and the hands of commissioned artists. The couple met at Bowdoin, married in 1980, and decided after graduate school to move back to Maine, where they had roots (the wife’s mother’s family has a history in Kennebunk that dates back to the 1700s). Several years after they were married, the couple bought their home in Cape Elizabeth and have been filling it with art ever since.

Like any couple who has been married for thirty years, the two complement each other—even, if not especially, in their art. The passion for acquiring new works is largely the wife’s, while the husband is the first to admit that he’s along for the ride. But what he lacks in compulsion to collect, he makes up for in practicality. She is the selector; he is often the determiner of how it will be displayed—where it will hang, how it will be lighted, and when enough is enough.

On entering either house, the homeowners’ favorites quickly emerge: Jeff Kellar. Michele Caron. Loren MacIver. Brett Bigbee. Thos. Moser. The home in Cape Elizabeth is an expansive 3,000 square feet and reminiscent of a museum; even the extra bedrooms have been transformed into music rooms, galleries, and sitting areas. Two giant Waldo Peirce murals line the walls of a sitting room, their colors rich and playful against a warm interior palette—raspberry sherbet, chocolate, and turquoise color the walls. Just as striking as the art is what houses it: the gilded frames and stands that display it. The window treatments, furniture, ceilings, lighting, and even the light switches have been carefully and deliberately crafted to complement the collection.

Thirty miles down the road and on the ocean, the Cape Porpoise home is nothing like its in-town Cape Elizabeth sister. Instead of artwork or colorful walls (they remain white and bare), the furnishings are art, the fireplace is art, the staircase is art (“it’s meant to look like a piece of furniture,” says the wife)—in some places, the lack of art on the walls is even artful.

This juxtaposition of the two homes is deliberate; both the husband and wife have high-profile careers—his in law, hers in finance. The Cape Porpoise cottage is a weekend escape, a place that is physically and visually relaxing. When the homeowners bought the house in 2000, they had one thing in mind: the view. “We really wanted the focus to be outside, not inside,” says the husband.

The cottage has come a long way from when the couple first saw it while they were kayaking more than ten years ago. After learning that the house was for sale, they bought it and immediately contacted Biddeford-based Salmon Falls Architecture to help renovate it. The bungalow had been built in the 1920s and had low ceilings and a footprint of just over 2,000 square feet. The homeowners were advised to tear down and start over, but they resisted, despite warnings that having only one bedroom would destroy the resale value of the home. “It didn’t matter to us. We don’t need much space; it’s just the two of
us,” says the husband. Spang Builders of Kennebunkport was also brought in on the renovation. The team took the house down to its timbers, keeping its original size and shape but reconfiguring the floor plan inside. “Because we wanted it to be so spare and soothing, the construction had to be really well done,” says the wife. And so it was.

While the ambience in each home may diverge significantly from the other, the presence of musical instruments is a common thread that binds them. In Cape Porpoise, an electric-blue harpsichord sits in the living room; while in Cape Elizabeth, the much quieter clavichord made of American cherry can be found in a music room. Downstairs in the same house is another harpsichord (this one sea-foam green). In his late 30s, the husband decided he wanted to learn music. “It’s really not easy to take up later in life, but I enjoy it. And my wife allowed the pieces because they look like art,” he jokes.

The exteriors are just as artful as the interiors. Both homes feature Japanese gardens by Buxton-based landscape designer Masa Seko, an artist himself. Seko installed plantings typical to a Maine garden—irises, day lilies, hostas, astilbes—but he also used some more exotic small trees and shrubs such as yews, boxwood, magnolia, Japanese maple, and juniper. One of his hallmarks is the use of variously sized rocks, from pea gravel to moss-covered boulders. “To me his gardens are about serenity and restraint,” says the wife.

While this couple has mastered the art of collecting, they don’t give themselves much credit for how it all seamlessly works together. Instead, they insist it happens effortlessly, a natural function of their deep appreciation of art. “Things have a way of falling together,” says the wife. “She just throws things together and it somehow works,” adds her husband. Over the decades, the couple’s tastes have evolved as well. As newlyweds, they began collecting Thos. Moser furniture and Jeff Kellar sculptures, but over the years they moved from American Crafts to a more eclectic style. “I began traveling more and that really opened my eyes to other things,” she says.

Of course there is an art, too, in selecting the right pieces. “For me it’s always a gut feeling, very emotional. I’ll know it’s right if I see it and keep thinking about it afterward. A lot of times, I will wait months before purchasing something,” she says. The tiny stupa in the dining room of the Cape Elizabeth home is a good example. “We saw that in March and I thought about it for months and corresponded with this patient man in Milan and finally ended up buying it in September.” While the attraction to certain pieces over others is more instinctual than intellectual, she has a certain proclivity for the atypical. “It has to be a little odd or unusual, with some element of humor. I don’t want to have things that everybody else has.”

These days, with twenty-five years of collecting behind them, the homeowners have a new rule: if something comes in and goes on a wall, something else has to come down. There is a delicate balance between just enough and too much. “I love to bring things home, but I don’t like it feeling cluttered,” says the wife. The couple had another rule in their Cape Porpoise home: they wouldn’t put anything on the walls. But they are already slowly breaking their own self-imposed rule. “I’m just so tempted, especially since we’re running out of space in Cape Elizabeth for art. I’ll see something and want to put it there, and he says ‘that’s not what it’s about, it wouldn’t look right,’” says the wife. “And he’s right.”

As much as the homes balance their art passions, they balance the couple’s two distinct personalities: the intuitive enthusiast and her practical, open-minded partner. And when one of them is pushed to their limit (“The African chair in the living room is not very comfortable or usable,” says the husband. “And then there’s the pipe light upstairs,” he adds. “We don’t have one normal lamp with a shade in either house”), they still respect the other’s point of view. “What I do at work is very practical,” says the wife. “But there’s this other part of me that doesn’t care about being practical. Collecting art allows me to express myself in this very different way.” “She’s a finance person focused on numbers, and yet she has this creative side that no one knows about,” he says. “To do this is so daring for her. It’s a life story.”

A story told in art.