Letter from the Editor – March 2013
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR – March 2013
By Rebecca Falzano | Managing Editor, Maine Home+Design
Birth stories.
I spoke with Kenna Haines (the artist who goes by Kendra Ferguson) just days before she was about to become a grandmother. The timing of our interview, though crunched, couldn’t have been more fortuitous: I myself was just a few weeks from the due date of my first baby. We talked about birth that day—the birth of a child is also the birth of a parent and grandparent—but also about the birth of beauty, the bringing to life of a vision. Her home in Deer Isle (“Simple Lines and Bright Spaces,” page 64) is a particularly beautiful embodiment of an idea taking shape after months (if not years) of nurturing, feeding, dreaming, and of course, hard physical and mental labor. And as much as her home is an extension of Haines’s artistry and that of the people who worked on it, it is also a structure with its own secrets that reveal themselves gradually: the way the moon shines in different windows over the course of a month, how a room looks when decorated for a wedding, the way the space is sure to change when tiny footsteps are underfoot. The things you can know about a house only after living in it for a while.
Each of the homes this month is a birth in its own right. A modest Cape (“Art in the House,” page 56) is a rebirth—a house Jane, a Cape Elizabeth physician, remodeled and filled with art, color, and life to start a new phase of her life. Ken Doran and Buddy Silvia’s modern house (“Midcentury Modern,” page 46) was brought to life by Jon Moody of Richard Moody and Sons Construction Co., who told his crew at the start, “Take your traditional thinking and put it aside.”
While the finished homes are what we photograph, we hope our stories give you a glimpse into the ways they are beautiful, not only in body but also in spirit. That is, the very process of getting there—the dreams, the creativity, the risk, the reward. When a house is born, so are its dwellers.
Rebecca Falzano
Managing Editor