Personal connections to coastal Maine are rarely based on a house alone. The sense of belonging goes far deeper than that. To the family who has gathered on this site for more than 40 years, the Atlantic coast is a repository of memories, summoned by the tang of the salt air and the grit of sand underfoot as they hunt for shells, stones, and sea glass along the beach. “For me, it’s the flag,” says the owner of this cedar-shingled home in Biddeford. “I hear it whipping in the wind and it’s my signal: This is Maine. We’re here.”

A flagpole has stood in the front yard of this multigenerational home for decades now, a gift to the home’s original owners. “Our dad was a sailor and insisted that a nautical flagpole had to have a yardarm—a yahd-ahm, is how he pronounced it—so he added one. He would raise the flag every morning with his grandchildren and lower it at dusk, saying, ‘It’s a tradition.’” 

The site’s original main house was a cute 1,600-square-foot Cape with three tidy bedrooms and one-and-a-half baths. “Our mom designed it, and the whole family loved coming here,” the owner explains. It was built at the lot’s crest in 1980/1981. The detached garage, with an upper-story family room and a small balcony overlooking the ocean, was added several years later, in 1986. In a nod to colonial New England tradition, the main house was divided into a collection of small rooms cut off from each other by a central fireplace wall that placed the living room and kitchen at opposing ends of the house. Windows, where they existed, were small too. Views? What views? 

“This project started in late 2019 as a kitchen renovation,” the owner recalls. “We needed to update our old appliances and wanted to open the space to the living area. We needed more counter space and places to sit. And we wanted to let more light in.” But the Cape’s chimney-wall arrangement made a simple downstairs reconfiguration impossible without removing structural walls. 

The family turned to Erik C. Peterson of Portland- and Kennebunk-based Peterson Design Group for insight. After sharing their practical needs with Peterson and tallying the number of current family members who might gather in the common rooms on any occasion (presently twenty-seven, including nine grandchildren under seven years old), the family had an awakening: After four decades, they had outgrown their cozy Cape.

“We had no intention of tearing the old house down,” the homeowner explains, “but we finally realized there was just no way it could fit our whole family anymore.” They knew they didn’t want to add a big, dormitory-like extension, which would have covered the yard and blocked their neighbors’ ocean views. It was Peterson who came up with the brilliant solution.

Inspired by the classic shingle-style cottages built along the Maine coast at the turn of the twentieth century, the new house measures a comfortable yet far-from-colossal 2,470 feet, with nine-foot ceilings designed to provide brighter, more open common spaces. The open kitchen forgoes upper cabinets in favor of a bank of windows over the farm sink and quartz countertop. A primary bedroom suite was added to the first floor, making way for two upstairs guest bedrooms with en suite bathrooms. An extra second-floor room with a convertible sectional sofa provides a quiet hideaway to read or nap away from the action. Sensitive to neighbors’ site lines, Peterson’s design raised the roofline from the old Cape’s original height by only about four feet. A multitasking single-story corridor now connects the cedar-shingled main house to the renovated garage, resulting in a dwelling that wraps around the site in a way designed to take in views from every room. “Erik gave us views we never knew we had,” the owner says.

Mike Keegan of Arundel-based Keegan Construction served as the project’s general contractor. He and his contracting team constructed the new house and renovated the 1980s garage. They gutted the garage interior to remediate mold and resheathed its exterior in durable fiber-cement board and battens. The outbuilding’s second-story family room, used as a quiet retreat and overflow sleeping area for generations, was bumped up with a shed dormer that increased interior floor space enough to fit a new study. Thermal-insulated glass sliders lead to a new, larger balcony edged in cable railing that provides safety without blocking ocean views. 

The new passage from the kitchen to the garage includes a pantry, laundry area, and extra half bath. Multiple decks and outdoor seating areas—including a stone patio with a firepit for chilly evenings—extend opportunities to be outdoors. The windows are abundant and large, framing scenic vistas from every corner of the house and soaring up to ceiling height to take in the sky as well as the water. All that glass, observes Peterson, is a defining difference between this century’s takes on shingle-style homes and their rambling, turn-of-twentieth-century predecessors. Double-paned, thermal-insulated windows and beefy insulation have changed how we can build in northern New England—especially close to the Atlantic, where the winds are notoriously rough.

Local garden designer Janet Kelly of KellyDesigns considered the views when restoring the landscape, too. She kept things simple with a scheme of ornamental grasses and hardy flowering perennials designed to add seasonal color. Houses on this road are spaced generously apart—“like the numbers on a clock,” as Peterson puts it—with open land in between, cordially extending neighbors’ precious “borrowed views.”

Indoors, Annie Talmage of Kennebunk-based Saltwater Home designed a serene interior where the views function as artwork. “The owner had a strong sense of what she wanted, and we helped her to achieve it,” Talmage remembers. “She brought me three pieces of weathered sea glass, one soft white, one blue, one pale green. That was the jumping-off point for our palette.” Talmage brought in layers of light-colored wood and resilient natural fibers: abaca, wicker, rattan, and marine rope. Performance upholstery fabrics—indoors and out—stand up to seacoast fog, sandy feet, and those nine grandchildren under seven. “Some people think beautiful interiors and coastal life don’t mix. We’re here to prove they do,” Talmage says.

When the custom farm table the owner selected for the dining room unexpectedly arrived at the house one day fully crated, the project’s mason, Carter Campbell—whose expert craftsmanship is revealed in the property’s stone-veneered foundation, chimney, stone paths, patios, and new cobbled driveway—paused his work to put in some extracurricular overtime. Pitching in his excavator, he helped get the weighty piece of furniture off the delivery truck, uncrated—and safely into the house. “Everybody helped,” he says, crediting the whole jobsite team, including Steve Carlton of Stephen’s Lawn Enforcement, who was there planting the newly designed gardens and lawn. 

“We were so lucky to work with this entire team,” says the homeowner, looking back. “We signed all the papers to start this project in February 2020. And then came COVID.” Shortages and supply-chain issues made everything more challenging, but the team’s professionalism and accountability got the job done beautifully.  

When the coast was clear for all three generations of this family to gather safely together again, the new house was ready to welcome everyone. “When we drive up our road and see our house in the same spot it has always been, it feels like nothing has changed,” says the owner. “We’re home.”