Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm,” wrote Plato, “depend on simplicity.” This maxim is as true today as in fourth-century BCE Greece. Yet simplicity requires discipline and restraint, qualities many clients throw to the wind when building a dream home. Fortunately, the couple who commissioned Knickerbocker Group to design this nearly 11,000-square-foot midcoast ocean-side residence (including detached office and garage) possessed these essential requisites.

“What we enjoyed most about working with them is their commitment to interiors without extraneous details,” says Knickerbocker Group’s founder Steve Malcom. “They would sacrifice a particular aesthetic desire in order to conform to the overriding precept of clean lines.”

The clients didn’t want a super-modern glass box either, recalls project architect Julien Jalbert, but something that would feel like it had been there for decades. The solution? “We lent it cleaner geometries, but the ‘Maine home’ aesthetic was built into the design with the rooflines and materials: cedar shakes, board-and-batten, standing-seam metal roof, and ipê decking.” 

Since the couple purchased the residence as a summer getaway where their family and friends could relax, adds interior architecture and design practice leader Bob Francisco, when it came to the indoors, “They wanted the house very much set up for having many guests and for entertaining. So the floor plan flows, spaces speak well to each other, and there’s great connectivity to the outside.”

Nowadays, the sense of openness, easy flow, and outdoor connection seems a given for many. But in actuality, achieving these aims is extremely complex, and it created substantial engineering challenges for Knickerbocker Group’s senior construction manager, Derek Chapman. For one thing, the central great room—containing living room, dining room, and kitchen—opens at the rear onto a 100-foot porch through 16-foot glass sliders that are flanked by banks of windows. “We had to pull off a lot of structural tricks,” explains Jalbert. “The window wall has a substantial horizontal beam at the middle to resist pressure from high winds.”

Opposite the sliders, a bridge at the second-story level connects the double-gabled volumes of the house, where most private quarters are located. Guests enter an expansive foyer and walk under this bridge to arrive at the great room. “There’s a fair amount of steel in that bridge in order to create this simple but grandiose space,” says Jalbert, “and to hold the walls and ceiling up without interior columns.” 

There was also the matter of the staircase extending from the foyer to the upper floor. To execute the design of the handrail’s continuous line and graceful switchback, the team employed a CNC router. But holding up the handrail and retaining its lighter-than-air quality without resorting to a big, bulky newel depended solely on the railing’s balusters. So, Jalbert says, “We used what look like slightly thicker candlepin balusters that happen at intervals.” Unless you look closely, they imperceptibly blend in with the other, thinner balusters, creating a single expressive visual gesture. 

The primary suite tub—made of precast concrete and weighing some 1,600 pounds when filled with water, let alone a person—also required the reinforcement of laminated veneer lumber (LVL) beams to keep it from crashing through the floor to the lower level. All this invisible support enables a sense of lightness and air by not chopping up interiors with view-obstructing vertical posts. 

Francisco handled the interior finishes. “The client liked the play between the organic feel of walnut and hard-edged metal cabinets,” he notes of the handsome kitchen. A similar material conversation occurs between the extensive oak flooring and the steel bar in the great room as well as the steel-framed glass front doors. 

The couple worked with James Light Interiors and Annie Kiladjian of Annie K Designs on furnishing the spaces. “It was a big job, a lot for one person,” says Light. “So we collaborated.” Not surprisingly, considering the simplicity of the structure, observes Kiladjian, the clients’ vision was “the opposite of fussy; the simpler, the better.” This meant, adds Light, that “everything needed to have very clean, straight lines. So whatever happened in a space had to mean it.”

Except for minimal small-scale patterns, Kiladjian continues, the designers relied on solid textural fabrics and a palette described by Light as “neutral and tailored like an Armani suit.” The object of this tactic, observes Kiladjian, was to focus attention “more on the outside than inside. It’s a west-facing house, so it has the most remarkable views and sunsets I’ve ever seen.” Occasional departures from this unifying aesthetic are a downstairs recreation area for younger visitors, leaf-patterned upholstery on a settee in the primary suite, and a powder room that sports Piero Fornasetti’s whimsical piscine “Acquario” wallpaper. 

Outdoor furniture took measured forays into graphic pattern. “The house is quite simple and monochromatic,” says Kiladjian, “so bold black-and-white stripes played well against it.”

One of the unique features of the house is a roof garden outside the primary suite. “We opted for more robust plantings here, so it would look like a meadow,” explains Jalbert. Rather than plant the roof with the usual low-growing sedums, creeping thyme, and the like, they incorporated taller plants along the L-shaped line of the window walls. From the inside, it looks like you’re on a high patch of land with nothing in your sight lines but the sea.

The water views, of course, were courtesy of Mother Nature, but with a little help from Shep Kirkland and Emily Goodwin at Boothbay-based Back Meadow Farm. As with many coastal lots in Maine, explains Goodwin, “The slope and grade of the property were challenging. Often a house can feel overshadowed by the hillside and in a hole. We tried to use plantings to soften the site.” Though they wanted low-maintenance grounds, the couple also craved mowable lawns for recreation. 

To achieve this, says Kirkland, “The slope had to be terraced and retained in many areas. We designed and installed the hardscape.” Using reclaimed block granite curbing on walkways, patio, and retaining walls, plus strategically placing boulders about the property “helped everything blend into the existing landscape and mimic the rocky coastline,” adds Goodwin.

None of this could have been possible without clients who had single-minded confidence in their devotion to simplicity. “There was not a lot of hesitancy about anything,” says Malcom. “They had a really clear picture of what they wanted.”

For the family who lives here, the result of this commitment is perhaps best expressed by a contemporary thinker who takes Plato’s admonition to its logical conclusion: the Indian author and speaker Prem Rawat. “The reward of simplicity,” he maintains, “is joy.”