It was three in the morning when Matt Herrington first saw the building that would become his family’s Maine home. From the pictures online, he could tell the coastal structure was in bad shape, but he could also see its immense potential. “It was unlike any other listing,” he recalls. “It was an American ruin. There was no water, no electricity, and the floors weren’t connected.” And yet the old yacht club was clearly “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” He ran upstairs and woke up his wife, Shannon Hart Herrington. “We’re flying to Bangor on Saturday,” he said. 

At the time, the couple (and parents of five) were living in Washington, D.C., but they were looking to make the move north. For years, they had dreamt of relocating to the Pine Tree State, but they wanted to do it right. This meant buying a property that had access to the Atlantic, working with an architect they admired, and hiring a local builder who could do justice to the project. The dilapidated boathouse offered both a challenge and a chance: they could restore, renovate, and remake. They could build something that would last decades, despite the rising tides. They’d need help, and Matt Herrington knew where to look. “I had been stalking Matt Elliott and his practice over the internet for years,” he says. “When I called him, I asked, ‘Have you ever been down to the old yacht club?’ and he said, ‘I’ve been waiting for this call for 25 years.’” 

In some ways, that’s the most remarkable thing about this project. The 100-year-old structure was familiar to many in the Blue Hill community, and there had been talk of restoring the building, but until the Herringtons came along no one was willing to fully commit. Although it had served as a community hub during the early decades of the twentieth century, after World War II the place had sat empty. Water poured into the foundations, the staircase rotted away, and eventually the shifting ground rendered much of the original structure unusable. “With a project like this, it has to be design driven rather than budget driven,” says Herrington. “We knew that going in.” This attitude jibed well with architect Corey Papadopoli’s vision. “We wanted to respect what was old but to make clear what was new,” he explains. “The main goal was to maintain the memory of the historic structure while updating it at the same time.” 

At first, the idea was to lift up the building and work underneath it, but builder Mike Hewes nixed this plan. “Two-thirds of the foundation was in really bad shape,” he explains. “It was set on big granite blocks but also built on six inches to three feet of clay. Which meant it was heaving each winter and then settling back down.” After removing some of the foundation and creating a tunnel below the building, subcontractor Kenny Thompson of Thompson Foundations “took one look and said, ‘I’m not going in there,’” recalls Hewes. “There was a lot of talk early in the process about what we could leave, and I told the team that I wasn’t going to put good work on top of bad.” Instead, they decided to number the timbers and remove them, piece by piece, relocating the salvageable elements of the old yacht club into a storage container on-site. This allowed Blue Hill–based M.E. Astbury and Son to get their excavator under the building to reinforce the existing foundation. Since the Atlantic laps at the base of the building, the basement needed to allow a certain level of water flow. “We had to work with our structural engineer to treat the foundation as a seawall. Instead of putting it on piers, we buttressed it on the inside,” says Papadopoli. “There are also concrete buttresses behind the wall that help resist the lateral force of the ocean. Thankfully, there were some openings in the wall, which we kept and made them permanently open. Instead of filling them in, we put in crushed stone and a network of drainage pipes.” This means that, when the ocean comes crashing up in a storm, the house will allow water to penetrate the basement without damaging the integrity of the home. “It was tested recently,” says Hewes of the brutal 2024 winter storms. “It held up really well.” 

Another major consideration was how to pack so much living into such a constricted space. Papadopoli decided to solve this problem using a combination of highly visible windows and impeccably concealed doors. From the exterior, the supersized glass dormers (imported from Germany) lend a modernist touch to the renovated boathouse, “which allowed us to get more volume into a compressed area,” says Papadopoli. “We also expanded the clubroom onto the deck with sliding glass doors, which gave us a little more footprint. Because it’s covered by the porch it’s not noticeable from the outside, but it makes a huge difference on the inside.” Papadopoli briefly thought about restoring the stuccoing on the outside of the building—though “stucco is an odd choice on the Maine coast,” he notes—before deciding to switch to eastern white cedar. “It’s lower maintenance, and it fits with the character of the region.” 

The interior design brief was similarly focused on merging traditional elements with sleek, contemporary luxury. The living areas have a minimalist, slightly industrial edge that fits with the rustic nature of the salvaged ruins. To let the tones of the wood and stone shine, the homeowners selected a palette of black, white, and gray for the paneling and tiles. “See this?” asks Herrington as he presses a hand to the white nickel-gap wall. “As you can tell, we hate handles, so everything is a touch-latch door.” According to him, the big feat of the project was packing “three en suite bedrooms and a laundry room into one very small upstairs space.” 

Papadopoli explains: “We were able to get everything they wanted into this square footage, but it meant some trade-offs. For instance, we treated the kitchen as a furniture piece rather than a built-in. We also tucked a lot of elements under the stairs.” Hewes and Company installed built-in shelving behind the beds, hidden clothes pegs that reveal themselves with a single push, and clever pockets of storage throughout the two stories. “The whole team really sweated every little detail, and it shows,” says Herrington. “This drifts into neurotic territory, but there are little things, like having a place for the espresso capsules by the coffee bar. That delights me.” The couple also “made a real effort” to use Maine suppliers. The teak soaking tub was sourced from Bath in Wood of Maine on Swan’s Island; the art on the walls was purchased primarily at Cynthia Winings Gallery in Blue Hill; and the roasted birch floors were supplied by AE Sampson and Company in Warren. 

Of course, with a property like this the real star of the show will always be the Atlantic. Papadopoli’s choice of glass ensures that, even in the depths of winter, the homeowners can track the shifting light and weather, and on warmer days they like to spend much of their time outdoors. “The exterior spaces designed by Todd Richardson are such a part of the whole thing,” says Herrington. 

“If I’m honest,” says Richardson, “we started with such an amazing site that the question was, ‘How do we not blow it?’” The Saco-based landscape architect was relieved to learn that the Herringtons weren’t bothered by a little walking. “So often, you have clients who want to park their car at the front door,” Richardson says. “In this project, you leave the car behind. You can enter in several different ways: there’s a footpath, and then there’s a more formal set of stairs that takes you to the primary entrance.” Using stone quarried from the site and its immediate surroundings and a series of native plantings, Richardson created a terrain that guides visitors gently toward the house. “Subtracting was a big part of what we were doing,” he explains, “at the edges in particular.” They took out a few trees, added a meadow garden (lush with Joe Pye weed, coneflower, and echinacea), and situated the requested hot tub on a ledge next to a moss-covered, truck-size boulder. “A lot of the time, people think of landscape as what you bring to the project,” Richardson says. “But here, the work was in editing the existing landscape and fitting the new elements into the existing space.” Like everyone involved with the build, Richardson wanted to tread lightly and respectfully. The building, as Harrington explained, meant a lot to the local community. It was a landmark, and he was going to be its steward. 

“Our hope with this project was that we could do this one thing, exactly how we wanted to do it,” says Herrington, now that the work has been completed and his family has had time to settle into their space. Although his wife splits her time between Maine and D.C., he was able to move full-time to the peninsula, and even got a part-time job working at the Brooklin Boat Yard, where he says he learns something new every single day. After spending decades dreaming of life in Maine, he couldn’t be happier with the reality. “It was an extraordinary privilege to be able to do this,” he says. “It exceeds all expectations.”