FEATURE-September 2010

By Debra Spark | Photography Irvin Serrano

A colorfully crafted lake house on Sebago

We used to vacation on the Outer Banks,” says the husband in the Virginia couple who own this Sebago Lake home. “But then it occurred to me that I hate hot weather. Why do I go to a hot place for vacation?” To solve the problem, the Virginia couple took a touring vacation of Maine. This was back in 1981. They stuck mostly to the coast but thought they should consider a lake area as well. Again, the issue was temperature; ocean water in Maine is so cold, after all. A copy of Country Inns and Back Roads led the couple to Migis Lodge in South Casco. “Migis,” says the wife, is “like camp for adults only with great food and a good wine list.”

Indeed, one of the property’s early owners was Charlotte Gulick, who cofounded the Camp Fire Girls (as well as the nearby Wohelo Camp for Girls, which Gulick’s descendants still run). The Virginia couple liked Migis so much that, after the summer of 1981, they went there every single year without fail for the next thirty years. Over time, they became such close friends with present owners Joan and Tim Porter that they traveled with them to New Zealand, Hawaii, and the Caribbean. As a result of the friendship, they say, they became “more and more connected to Maine,” and in the summer of 2005, they started building their own Maine home.

One day, while in a boat on the lake, they spotted two houses that they particularly liked. Both were designed by Rick Goduti of Goduti-Thomas Architects in Portland. And both, they came to learn, were owned by former Migis guests. Then the couple found out that two more nearby homes were designed by Goduti and occupied by former Migis guests. Soon enough, Goduti was the Virginia couple’s architect as well.

“The first thing we did was write a memorandum to Rick divided into two parts,” says the husband. “Part A was a philosophical section that dealt in broad generalities of what we were looking for, and Part B looked at very specific things. We wanted a house that belonged on a lake and that fit the environment. We didn’t want to be pretentious. We wanted the interior to have a lot of wood and natural materials. We thought what we wanted would be reminiscent of Arts and Crafts style, an American bungalow style, but also have Frank Lloyd Wright influences. Our idea of a Sebago Lake house—from Migis—was an interior of knotty pine, so we liked the idea of a lot of wood, but we didn’t want knotty pine as the predominant wood. We wanted a modernized concept.”

Goduti delivered on all this—and more. “The relationship with your architect is almost a psychoanalytic one,” says the husband. “Rick could really analyze our feelings about things.” One thing Goduti must have intuited is that the couple wanted an unusual place. “It doesn’t have a style,” he says when asked to define the house. Builder Bob Marcoux adds, “Size-wise, it rambles every which way.”

The outside is a series of distinctly defined elements—including hipped, gable, and eyebrow dormers, as well as projecting semicircular bays with copper conical roofs—that are unified by their materials as well as their form. For instance, shingles throughout are stained the color of tree bark, and the windows are all trimmed in red and green, while the gentle arch on the front door is repeated in the home’s balconies as well as the curved mullion that links the upper part of the great room’s wall of windows.

Inside, the first impression is of wood—and color. The center room is constructed from huge post-and-beam timbers, with Belgian cherry floors, Western red-cedar walls, and a white-pine ceiling. All the collar ties and posts are Douglas fir, and the fireplace wall shelving is mahogany, as are the window frames. But this isn’t the only way that wood is used. Maine furniture makers and cabinetmakers made much of what is in the house. In the great room alone, there are barrel chairs made by Gregg Lipton of Gregg Lipton Furniture in Cumberland and an unusual combination ottoman and coffee table of Goduti’s design. Jamie Johnston of Jamie Johnston Furniture in Portland is responsible for a number of other pieces in the room, including two semi-circular console tables, which sit behind the couches, two red chairs, and two side tables that Johnston calls “chicklet” tables due to the shape of their tops.

The dining room features a table designed by Bob Newton of Yarmouth and built by furniture maker Peter S. Turner of South Portland. The table’s eight chairs come from Green Design Furniture in Portland. The husband and wife say they dithered over the chairs and other purchases, bringing items to their house and then rethinking things. Commenting on the chair decision, the husband says, “It was as if you knew this hunk in high school but didn’t think to marry right away.” Adds his wife, “They say you make 10 to 15,000 decisions when you build a house like this. We made 30,000 because some decisions we made three times.”

The kitchen, too, is dominated by wood. Originally, the couple wanted a sleek modern kitchen with smooth wood, but they realized that approach would be wrong for the space, and they ended up borrowing more from the Arts and Crafts style they love. Goduti worked out an intricate cabinet design using mahogany with square curly-maple insets and bronze hardware. With variations, the cabinetry is repeated throughout the house, in places such as the bathrooms, the screening room (for watching movies), and the walk-in closets in the master bedroom. Tom Gilbert of Brunswick’s East Coast Woodworking is responsible for the cabinetry, the interior and exterior doors, and the railings, balusters, and newel posts on a bridge that runs between two of the upstairs guest bedrooms. The bed frame in the master bedroom was designed by Bob Newton. Greg Frangoulis of Maine Cottage in Yarmouth is responsible for the bedside tables. And this short list of the craftsmen who contributed to the house is far from exhaustive.

As for the color: Carol Bass, painter and cofounder of Maine Cottage in Yarmouth, is responsible for choosing the pillow, window, upholstery, and wall colors throughout the house. When asked to describe the shades, she notes, “If a color must have a name, it is a name from the natural world: spruce, fireweed, butter, seaweed, melon, guava.” Selecting colors and finding fabrics was not her only contribution, though. She created a large painting for the master bedroom and led the homeowners to a decorative wall painter, various furniture makers, and select stores, while envisioning several other aspects of the home herself. She also designed the maple chest at the foot of the master bedroom and worked with Bob Newton to design the dining room table, which is influenced by the designs of George Nakashima.

“You have to start somewhere,” the wife says when talking about the decorating process, and often enough the design began with a piece that Bass helped the homeowners select. For instance, the colors of the living room derive from the colors of a rug that Bass and the homeowners found at Mougalian Rugs in Scarborough, while the colors of the primary guest bedroom derive from a fabric that Bass found in Boston.
While wood dominates, other materials are used in surprising ways throughout the house. An upstairs bridge overlooking the great room is made of mahogany and bronze. Al Kronk of Rusted Puffin Metalworks in Portland is responsible for the bronze elements on the balusters and newel posts, as well as the copper top on the kitchen island and a free-form copper sculpture in the home’s living room. The kitchen counters are flamed granite, and stone was used on the home’s exterior and interior. A stone wall starts on the outside terrace, breaks for the great room window, and continues into the living room and around the corner of the room before ending in a vertical wall of stone near the kitchen. This is just one of the ways in which the architect tried to visually unite the home’s exterior with its interior, one of the principal goals of the design.

It is perhaps surprising that the Virginia couple still drive—all of a mile down the road—to continue their annual tradition of vacationing at Migis Lodge. But they love the place and now go for a weeklong family reunion. They discovered—but only after building their new home—that they have further connections to the area, including several relatives who happen to attend Camp Wohelo. “Somehow our family history on Sebago Lake goes back a few years,” says the wife. Today, the couple spends half the year in their spectacular house, and they expect to continue writing that family history well into the future.