When the pandemic struck, Eric and Sarah Olivares of Yarmouth decided they’d isolate in a series of rentals to socially distance their young family during the summer of 2020 (their two sons and daughter now range between 3 and 15 years old). One day while boating on Rangeley Lake near one of those rentals, the Olivareses spotted a camp on the shore that reminded Sarah, who grew up in Portland, of
the cottage where her family had summered on Casco Bay. “The style was really classic for the area—low profile, brown with green trim,” she recalls. 

When they eventually toured the camp that August, however, it was a reassuring sound that propelled them to make an offer on the house. “The way the screen door slammed!” exclaims Sarah. “It sounded just like my childhood.”

There were other reasons too, of course. “It is probably the most private place I’ve ever vacationed,” observes Eric. “There are no lights on the opposing shore because we’re looking at a state park.” The 2,000-square-foot house also came with a guest cottage that they would be able to rent out during the ski season at nearby Saddleback Mountain, helping them recoup some of the costs of necessary renovations. 

Even fond memories need a bit of buffing and polishing to keep them fresh, so the couple engaged Rangeley Building and Remodeling to make the camp suitable for the family’s modern needs. Built in 1926, it was known locally as “Camp Summa,” because, notes the company’s president, Mark Gordon, with a chuckle, “A former owner’s parents had hoped their son, who attended Harvard, would graduate summa cum laude.” The man in question never achieved this honorific, so when he inherited the home after his parents’ deaths, “He decided to call it Camp Summa as a joke.”

Gordon and the firm’s designer and social media manager, Jill Crosby, set about modernizing Camp Summa into something that would be, well, more “summa,” yet still adhere to Sarah’s stated desire for authenticity: “I didn’t want to sterilize it or have something that looks like a Crate and Barrel catalog,” Sarah says. “There’s a freedom in a camp to have a casual mix-and-match feeling.” 

Some major renovations were definitely in order. “It had no foundation,” remembers Crosby, “so we picked up the building, moved it, poured a foundation, and moved it back.” It was a delicate undertaking because of the risk of destabilizing the original, massive, floating stone fireplace in the main room while hoisting the structure. Thankfully, the fireplace stayed intact. They also added an entrance/mudroom and a basement and removed a flat ceiling in the kitchen to expose the natural roofline. 

“The main goal was to get the building into a position where it could live on,” explains Crosby. That meant, among other things, taking the outdated 1980s-style kitchen down to the studs and redoing all the bathrooms. There was a lot of reconfiguring of spaces: sacrificing a bathroom to reroute the stairs, closing off the entrance to another bath and creating access from the hall instead, and working with Vining’s Custom Cabinets to rethink the kitchen (now with an island and seating) and add windows. “We worked hard to keep the cabinets feeling more vintage, very detailed, and timeless,” she adds. They also carried light into a stairwell by repurposing an old window Gordon and Crosby had lying around. Used as an interior window, it brightened a space that would have been quite dark, while also adding some quirky character.

“Back when a lot of these places were being built,” notes Crosby, “they were used as hunting camps, not lake houses where the view was important.” Adding and enlarging fenestration improved sight lines to the scenic lake and surrounding woods. 

Revamping baths—never very elevated features of most camps—provided upgraded modern conveniences and updated their aesthetic with beautiful tile work and, like the countertops throughout the house, honed granite surfaces to “keep it more natural than polished slab, which avoided things becoming glitzy,” Crosby says. 

There was extensive winterization too, since, adds Sarah, “Every season here offers something to do.” The new basement accommodated another bedroom for the eldest son, bringing the lodging count to five. The bathroom here also serves as a place to wash up from swimming and water sports before going upstairs, since it is below grade and has a walk-out that ushers family and friends to and from the shoreline and dock. Additionally, it houses a game room for everyone to play cards, board games, or foosball, and the new built-in bookshelves are stocked with plenty of reading material. 

The team reworked a lot of surface materials as well. “Whenever we took off edge-and-center beadboard, we saved it and reused it,” says Crosby. For instance, drywall walls in the dining room received this salvaged beadboard to ensure that a warm, rustic aesthetic would permeate the interiors. During an early meeting, Sarah remembers, “Mark [Gordon] noticed a rip in the carpet around the fireplace and saw there was hardwood under it.” The whole family got into the act of taking up the carpeting throughout to expose the original birchwood underfoot. 

Where color was desired, Crosby suggested hues that reference the outdoors. Sage green on the kitchen cabinets, mudroom built-ins, and window frames alludes to the forest; a blue in the bathroom, to the water of the lake and the sky. Even the wallpaper in a powder room riffs off the field of lupines planted between the main house and the guest cottage. The effect is to ground the house more firmly in its surroundings.

In keeping with the “mix-and-match feeling,” Crosby worked with her clients to edit the furnishings that came with the house. Among the things they kept were the dining room chairs, which they redeployed to a new card table in the game room, and the furniture in the kids’ rooms, which includes charming, camp-appropriate painted metal beds. The Olivareses added some family heirlooms to these furnishings—namely, an old piano that now lives behind the floating fireplace.

New pieces, some brought in by the Olivareses and others suggested by Crosby, also entered the mix. “Eric picked the midcentury modern, Brady Bunch couch in the basement,” says Sarah. The Olivareses also replaced the dining room chairs with more typical Windsor-style versions and added a Pendleton club chair by the fireplace.

“Their relationships and tradespeople up there are great,” says Eric of Gordon and Crosby. “They knew the guy who had done the original found-wood railing on our porch. And Jill gets the design piece really well.”

The couple and their kids, cat Larry David, and dog Bandit couldn’t be happier with the results. “Sitting on our screened porch away from the mosquitos and listening to the loons,” remarks Sarah, “it doesn’t get better than that. I even love our woodshed! There are four cords of wood stocked in there, which tells you we’re going to have a lot of cozy fires.”