Mallika Malhotra long imagined having her own creative space. As a photographer, brand strategist, and mentor who works with female entrepreneurs to develop and hone their brands, Malhotra desired a place that goes beyond the typical home office. She envisioned a space where she could meet with and easily photograph clients and someday host workshops and retreats. “The studio has been a dream in the making,” says Malhotra.

Before her husband’s medical career brought them to Maine, the couple, who have three sons, lived in a part of the country where real estate is particularly pricey. Although she had a home office, she met with clients in coffee shops and hotel lobbies, and oftentimes she photographed them on the street. When her husband took a position in Portland, Malhotra’s dream became a reality. The couple purchased a shingle-style house in Falmouth Foreside with a detached, barnlike garage topped by an unfinished second story.

Malhotra approached local designer Samantha S. Pappas to create a “feminine, happy, inspiring, and uplifting” interior. “Mallika’s inspiration pictures were of clean, all-white-everything studios,” says Pappas. She studied Malhotra’s business website, mikifoto.com, so that the scheme would align with her client’s brand. The result? A pure white palette infused with blush tones and punctuated with oak, black, and brass accents. “She wanted feminine; you can’t go wrong with pink,” Pappas says. “Pale pink tones are airy and play well with white oak.”

Pappas partnered with local builder Matthew R. Cotnoir of MasterCraft Carpentry to transform the 650-square-foot raw space into a pristine, light-filled aerie. At the start, Malhotra’s husband proposed that the team tear out the framing for the ceiling to vault it, so the room is now almost 20 feet high at its peak. Malhotra deems the move “brilliant,” noting how much airier it made the space feel. “Anything we envisioned, Matt [Cotnoir] just said yes,” Pappas recalls. “It was really refreshing.”

Three evenly spaced skylights help brighten the lofty studio. “Winters are long in Maine; that natural light is medicine,” Malhotra says. Pappas notes that they also added two windows on either side of the existing window in the back of the building. “It balances the windows in the front, and brings in more light,” the designer says.

Knowing that Malhotra admired the shiplap ceiling of the great room in the main house, Pappas suggested they create one in the studio too. The treatment provides some visual connection between the structures and a hint of a classic Maine sensibility. The rectilinear white oak and stainless-steel cable stair rail reinforces Pappas’s pristine design.

To keep the shell sleek, there is no trim around the doors or the windows, or where the walls meet the wood ceiling. “Drywall wraps around and returns into the window with a corner bead,” Cotnoir says. As for the (deceptively) simple oak slab doors, the builder says that they were the most challenging part of the project. “Without trim to hide gaps or uneven edges, every door had to be cut perfectly,” he explains.

The project’s other big challenge was refinishing the stair treads, risers, and nosings to exactly match the white of the prestained engineered hardwood floorboards. “The pieces for the stair came from a different company than the flooring, and the color was way off,” the builder says.

Like the floors and (eventually) the stairs, the walls and the ceiling are a clean, crisp white— Benjamin Moore’s Chantilly Lace to be exact. “The bright white bounces light around the studio but isn’t sterile,” Malhotra says. “Samantha picked a white with warmth, but enough coolness so there is no yellow cast in my photos.”

Photography was also front of mind when it came to maximizing the floor plan. “Mallika wanted different vignettes that would serve as backdrops for her pictures,” Pappas says. Each area within the larger space—the kitchenette, the conference table, the desk, and the seating area—serves double duty in terms of everyday utility and as a photographic environment. “I can use the kitchenette for the coffee shot, the desk for the working woman shot, [and] the sofa for a shot with a laptop,” Malhotra says.

While the fresh feel of the space works well for any situation, Malhotra knew she could increase the options in her relatively small space by choosing easy-to-move furniture. “We intentionally chose portable furniture so I can create different experiences,” she says. And then there are the props, which she stores in the large closet at the top of the stairs. “I have all sorts of props to tell the stories of my clients,” Malhotra says. Among them are mugs, baskets, books, affirmation cards, champagne glasses, a magnifying glass, an old telephone, a blowhorn, confetti, and fake flowers and plants. “People can come and make it their own,” she says.

Pappas nestled the kitchenette between the capacious prop closet and narrow bedroom, which she located in a corner that would not block any front- facing windows. “It was a little tricky to lay out because we wanted as much natural light as possible in the main space,” she says. (The bath is in the corner behind the stairs because that’s where the plumbing line came up.)

Pink ceramic tiles stacked vertically, end-to-end, pull the eye back and up. Brass sconces punctuate the tableau like jewelry, while cantilevered oak shelves hold pretty glassware and color-coordinated mugs. Flat-slab oak cabinetry by Reynolds Custom Woodworks sports matte black hardware, which adds some visual weight.

Wallpaper with an abstract wash is the backdrop for the desk, an oak dining table that Pappas fitted with casters. “The casters raised it just enough to slide a file cabinet underneath,” she says. Malhotra, who was a tad nervous about the wallpaper going up so high, loves the look and appreciates its versatility. “It’s like another prop,” she says. As for that being the right wall for the desk, the homeowner admits, “I didn’t listen to Samantha at first and kept playing around with the placement; she knew it should go there all along.”

A white lacquered conference table surrounded by chairs in a whisper of blush sits off to one side of the desk, and in front of it a low-slung sofa stretches under the eaves. Malhotra lauds the upholstered lounge chair that is sometimes nearby. “It’s a great size; you can sit crisscross applesauce on it,” she says. “I move it around a lot.” A trio of jaunty teak stools with a Calicool vibe that work as stools or as tables rounds out the arrangement.

Finally, between the sofa and a wall of the bath, a faux leather chair with a molded, midcentury silhouette and a vintage walnut tripod table compose Malhotra’s headshot corner. It’s got a bit more of a masculine mood than the rest of the place, though Pappas points out that it doesn’t feel disjointed. “The camel leather is nice with the pink and ties to the hint of orange in the wallpaper.”

Malhotra still swoons over her studio, hardly believing she gets to work here every day. Pappas’s preschooler, who hung out while she set up the space, was equally enchanted. “She kept asking if this was my office,” the designer says. “I wish!”

Anne Shirley, an eleven-year-old orphan, approaches Green Gables in a carriage, her arm “black and blue” from all the times she’s pinched it to make sure she isn’t dreaming, that she really is coming home. The carriage stops under a row of poplars, their silky leaves rustling. “Listen to the trees talking in their sleep,” she whispers. “What nice dreams they must have!”

Though Anne is the fictional creation of L.M. Montgomery, what she says is true: there is a certain poetic wisdom to be found in trees. What if we, as Anne surely would have wished, could sleep among them? What if, at the end of the day, we climbed into a tree instead of walking into a house? Would we, in our rest, absorb some of the insight that their heartwood is sure to hold?

The idea of walking around in a tree, let alone sleeping in one, was a farcical idea for a city-raised kid like me. But with travel becoming more and more about the experiential, specifically when it comes to where one lays one’s head, I decided it was (pardon the pun) high time to check out some of Maine’s most unique accommodations.

SEGUIN TREE DWELLINGS

Georgetown // seguinmaine.com // Photography by Myriam Babin

The first feature to note about Seguin is the view. Located on a wooded finger of land that rises above the curving Back River tributary in Georgetown, the three minimalist dwellings, Madawaska, Isle au Haut, and Souhegan—all rentable on Airbnb—were each built with a wall of windows that offer an unobstructed lookout through the conifers. From my bed in Madawaska, I can see clusters of pines perched at the edge of the rocky shoreline, which becomes even more rugged at low tide, like the land is revealing its crooked teeth.

“We were thinking a lot about Scandinavian design,” says co-owner Marsha Dunn, “and wanting it to feel clean and simple. We didn’t put artwork inside, so the window is where your focus is.”

Marsha runs the business along with her husband Philip Francis, his brother Loren Francis, and Loren’s wife Ida Lennestål. Each of them has a concentration and a craft—Loren is a carpenter and a builder and, with a team of helpers, constructed the dwellings by hand; Ida’s a photographer who documents Seguin’s properties and teaches yoga in the newly finished “Gathering Space” (used for workshops and events and also rentable); Philip is a professor of philosophy and handles the marketing; Marsha is the designer. She conceived of the dwellings’ furnishings and decor, from the wide-planked, blonde wood floors covered in jute rugs to the space-saving cabinets of the mini-kitchens and bathrooms.

Luxury flourishes in the space, like screened-in porches containing Island Teak Company Adirondack chairs with thick woolen blankets draped over their backs. On bathroom hooks hang flannel L.L.Bean robes, ready to be used en route to the private, wood-fired cedar hot tub located on each treehouse deck. The window walls, whose wavy vintage panes were salvaged from the Plant Memorial Home in nearby Bath, open up and out, hooking to the ceiling like Bahama storm shutters, allowing breezes moving through the trees to cool the rooms on hot summer days.

The three treehouses are made up of two separate, compact spaces—one a bedroom and the other a cooking, washing, and lounging area—connected either by a platform or via rope bridge. The two-building design is not only necessary (a large oak juts dramatically through a hole cut out in the deck between Madawaska’s buildings), but it’s also genius. Despite the smallness of the spaces—which Loren tells me were determined not just by financial and spatial constraints but also by his obsession with renovating and living in vintage trailers—their separation serves to break up the already tiny rooms.

The furniture, designed by Marsha and built by Loren, is equally hyperfunctional. The king-sized beds pull apart to become two extra-large twins if preferred; the side of the headboards open to reveal a hanging closet; built-in drawers beneath the mattress pull out for extra storage. “We were thinking, how can you have a space where you can hang your clothes, for instance, and not have them up on a bunch of hooks,” says Marsha. “Often you come into a place you’re staying, and it looks relaxing, and then you put your stuff in it, and it looks chaotic right away.” In Souhegan, the largest of the dwellings, which sleeps four, the second structure can be used both as a second bedroom at night and as a larger living area during the daytime, its modular furniture easily converting into couches and a coffee table.

The structures feel as if they grew here organically, attaching themselves to the trees like fungi, but their germination began decades ago. Philip and Loren grew up on the 55-acre peninsula directly across the water from where Seguin now stands.

“It was just woods when we started thinking of buying the land,” says Marsha, referencing the Seguin property, which, after years of the Francis boys looking out at it and dreaming about its uses, finally went on the market in 2015. “First we were thinking of a hub to do creative programming and interdisciplinary conversations and retreats,” Marsha says, “and then we thought we could have some rental properties. But we wanted it all to feed us creatively in some way.”

They closed on the land on Leap Year Day, 2016, and Loren began working 80-hour weeks to get the first two treehouses ready for the summer season, constructing them in the boathouse in order to grind away through the cold. “Marsha drew these beautiful sketches of what they were going to look like,” he says, “and we posted them on Airbnb, and people started renting them. So, before I’d even finished the second one it was like, ‘Wow!’ We had a little more confidence economically.” Then, Loren and his friends drove the dwellings across the land and dropped them into place with a small crane truck. “Moving them over—they were strapped down—I was smacking trees. It was heart-pounding stuff.” Loren laughs. “The craning, oh my god, the craning and then moving them over was just unbelievably difficult. And awesome.”

Of course, after meticulous engineering and construction—and plenty of support cables—there is nothing scary about the treehouses now. But it’s still nice, if not a little other-worldly, to hear someone walk across the floor on the other side and to feel the buildings shake a bit, or settle, a reminder that you’re not on solid ground.

THE WOODS MAINE

Norway // thewoodsmaine.com // Photography by Myriam Babin

In the decade before Sam and Rob Masabny dove full-time into running The Woods Maine, a luxury treehouse rental on their 10-acre property on Pennesseewassee Lake in Norway, they were living a high-stress existence. After four years in New York City, where Sam worked in television and radio and Rob was in real estate, followed up by several years in executive positions at the software startup HubSpot in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they felt it was time to pull the plug.

“I was physically ill,” says Sam, recalling those years. “Like, something’s gotta give.”

Rob had long dreamed of buying land in Maine, so when their friends, who run Granite Ridge Estate and Barn, turned them on to Norway, they started taking the dream a little more seriously. “I had just had spinal surgery,” Sam says, “and our friends asked us, ‘When are you guys buying property here?’” She and Rob looked at listings online and found their home. “I said to Rob, as soon as the doctor clears me, I want to go look at this property. Two weeks later, we put in an offer.”

With all the extra acreage, the couple knew they wanted to build a second residence for visiting friends and family and to rent out for ancillary income. But they didn’t want it to just be a guesthouse; they wanted something different. “We used to watch Treehouse Masters all the time,” says Rob. For kicks, he and Sam started running the numbers: would it be any more expensive to build a treehouse on their property than a regular guesthouse? Then they reached out to Pete Nelson of Nelson Treehouse and Supply—the star of the Animal Planet show and the visionary behind some of the world’s most magical dwellings in the sky.

“I thought it would take a couple of weeks to hear back,” says Sam, “but two hours later we got an email. Two weeks later we were on the phone with the Nelson family. And about two weeks after that Pete flew out from Seattle.” The group hit it off immediately. Nelson looked for the ideal spot on the property—“touching all of the trees, doing his voodoo magic,” as Sam describes it—then returned to Washington state and sent sketches and a budget back to Sam and Rob in Massachusetts, where they were still living and working fulltime. As is typical, the estimate was much bigger than Sam had anticipated. “We thought it was a unique opportunity to build something incredible. We didn’t want to fall in the middle when we built it. We wanted to create a fully functional home in the trees. So we just went for it.”

And that’s exactly what The Woods Maine feels like: a rustic yet refined two-bedroom, two-bathroom tree home, fully stocked with all the accoutrements of life. (But as compared with my life, even better stocked.) The kitchen comes equipped with a stylish SMEG fridge and coffee maker, a Bertazzoni oven, a full set of WÜSTHOF knives, a MacKenzie-Childs teapot, and—well, the list goes on. Feel like an espresso? Brew some Nespresso. Celebrating someone’s birthday? There’s a hand mixer and birthday candles in the cabinet. “I want people to go in and feel like they’re on vacation, but like they’re very much at home,” says Sam. There are puzzles and board games galore, a flat-screen setup with several streaming services, a gas fireplace, and a heat pump system that, even in the depths of winter, makes the entire place warm and snug.

Most of the treehouse was precut in Washington state. Then Nelson and his team trucked 83 tons of lumber across the country. “At the time, the roads were still posted up here,” says Sam, “so we had to make the call to send the truck or not with the hopes that they would be unposted before they arrived.” Thankfully, the ground thawed in time, and the final build began.

After the treehouse went up, Sam and Rob decided to leave their company in Massachusetts and dive headfirst into crafting a life in Maine. “Part of my job had been helping other businesses grow their business,” explains Sam. “I thought, am I going to stick with a day job, and the treehouse will just be a side hustle? No, I know I can do it. I want to take exactly what I know and apply it to our own business.”

Much of the guest experience at The Woods lies in the details and the design. The deck and staircase railings, custom cut from tree branches, are particularly striking, with bits of still-live moss clinging to the bark. Both inside and out, one can see the craftsmanship in every corner, from the sliding barn door in the bunk room to the handcrafted coat and boot storage in the entryway to the built-in banquette. For the interiors, Sam worked directly with Christina Salway, a New York– and Maine-based interior designer who collaborated with Nelson on his show for two-and-a-half years and continues to consult on his treehouse projects off-camera. Typically, Salway is brought in at the very end of the Nelson builds, but Sam reached out to her during the sketch phase. “I wanted to work very closely with her on the vision I had,” she says.

“Sam is a real powerhouse,” says Salway. “She knows exactly what she wants and has a really terrific sensibility. It’s easy to lean ‘lodge,’ kind of ‘rustic cabin’ when you’re in a treehouse. Sam had a clear vision that she wanted it to be cozy and magical but didn’t want to lose sight of it also being a luxurious, opulent experience.” Much of this is accomplished with the kitchen: how it’s laid out, the appliances, the overall functionality. “You can turn out a real meal in there,” says Salway.

Salway describes her and Sam as being “aesthetic soulmates,” evidenced in their choice of lighting over the banquette area and the island. “They’re the same pendant lights I put in my husband’s restaurant in New York,” says Salway. “When we started talking, I was like, ‘Oh girl, I know the light for you.’ It’s elegant, but it also has a little bit of an antiqued quality, so it feels timeless and classic.” The navy blues throughout the home and the blue of the buffalo plaids were first inspired by the splash of indigo tiles that Sam had laid into the floor just inside the doorway, which catches mud and dirt from shoes before guests slip into the provided slippers. And while the all-wood interior has the same fir flooring and pine paneling characteristic of Nelson’s work, Sam and Salway made a point to whitewash much of the wood to add a little nuance to the aesthetic and to keep it from looking, in Salway’s words, “like a cabin box.”

Plenty of local goodies greet you upon arrival, like Time and Tide coffee from Biddeford and Ragged Coast Chocolates from Westbrook. And there are several unexpected items for use, like Seabags and ChappyWrap blankets from The Woods Maine Shop, which Sam first started online and now also runs as a beautifully curated and browsable storefront on Norway’s Main Street. A portion of the apparel and bag sales go to supporting the Western Foothills Land Trust, including such gems as the nearby Roberts Farm Preserve, which not only maintains 12 kilometers of accessible, non-motorized, multiuse Nordic trails overlooking Norway Lake, but also offers use of cross-country skis and snowshoes in every size free of charge.

“A lot of the Maine brands are coastline; that’s what people think of when they think of Maine,” says Sam. “But for us, there’s this whole other world, and we’ve always said we’re not in the business of marketing The Woods Maine. We’re in the business of marketing our town and our community, and we just happen to be a destination along the way.”

PURPOSELY LOST

Sanford // purposelylost.com // Photography by Mike Iannetta

Peter Valcourt and his business partner, Bryce Avallone, had been completing condo conversions in Portland since 2014, but when prices started to skyrocket they decided to invest in something a little farther afield—and a little more in line with their personal interests. “We’re both outdoorspeople,” says Valcourt. The two’s business trips often include hiking and even trying to shoot an elk together. “We canoe; Bryce is a whitewater guide with an environmental background. We decided to start looking for some land.”

Of course, reasonable land prices in southern Maine weren’t easy to find either. “It didn’t exist,” Valcourt clarifies. But then, a friend who is a surveyor in the Sanford area put Valcourt onto Littlefield Pond, which, unlike most bodies of water in southern Maine, had no houses on it and was surrounded by mature pines that hadn’t been cut over. Valcourt did his research and found that a lawyer in the town owned 15 untouched acres on the pond. “When I first approached him to see if he’d be interested in selling, the answer was no,” says Valcourt. “And then,” he laughs, “I semi-stalked him. A little bit. I was very persistent.”

Valcourt’s tenacity paid off, and soon he and Avallone had acreage to play with. They decided to create a subdivision of f ive lots in which they’d build three treehouses and two hobbit homes. “We both watched Treehouse Masters on TV,” says Valcourt, “and noticed a pretty big trend in doing these kinds of unique stays.”

Because subdivisions require extra licensing rigamarole and, due to the property’s proximity to water, additional approval from the Department of Environmental Protection, they decided to start with one treehouse to make sure the demand was there. “That was 2019, and we were finished in the spring,” says Valcourt. “It was super successful. It was way more expensive than we wanted, but I keep saying it will pay itself back.” In September of 2020 the approval for the final two treehouses came through, and construction began again. “Going into wintertime, during COVID, with the highest prices for lumber, of course,” Valcourt says.

For engineering, Valcourt and Avallone worked with Bild Architecture in Portland. “The idea was, we would have one base with the same legs and floor for each treehouse, and then we could play with what’s sitting on that base,” says Valcourt. The Canopy Treehouse, with its gabled roofline, is the most compact at 350 square feet, and contains a sleeping loft and an attached sleeping pod. The Cliff House has a rustic barn look and features a screened porch with a daybed and outdoor dining. The Sky-Frame is a modern take on the classic A-frame, with a much higher pitch. “We wanted to do some contrast with color, so we went with a black roof and bright red cedar shakes,” says Valcourt.

Sky-Frame is the largest of the three treehouses, with two queen bedrooms and a shared full bath. From the loft, you can lie looking up through the skylight at the tops of trees swaying in the wind and, at night, stars lit up behind the branches. During the day, large triangular windows overlook mature pines, maples, and oaks, and in wintertime, the frozen trout pond 200 feet away.

Each rental includes modern amenities like fully stocked kitchens, thermostat-controlled heating, and screen projectors for streaming, plus extras like outdoor barbecue grills, fire pits with quality patio chairs, and even electric hot tubs that connect to Bluetooth for tunes and that are set in prime stargazing territory. Valcourt and Avallone had private docks built for each dwelling (soon to be five, as the hobbit homes are in the process of being buried during this writing) just a 30-second walk down a meandering path through the trees. Each dock comes with a canoe, fishing poles, and inner tubes for lakefront paddling and lounging. “The pond’s blocked off, so there are no motorboats, making it very chill,” says Valcourt. “And the water’s as clear as can be, with awesome swimming in the summertime.”

The most unique thing about Purposely Lost is that the entire property is carbon neutral. The partners invested in 200 solar panels and placed them in a field almost to Bangor, feeding the grid and generating enough power to offset electrical expenses. Every decision, from the energy-efficient heat pumps to the ultra-insulated walls and f loors, came from a place of eco-consciousness. Putting their money where their mouths are, there are even electric vehicle chargers in each of the wooded lots.

Do the owners ever stay there themselves? “We try to,” says Valcourt. “If we have vacancies during the week, we’ll take turns. And sometimes, we just go out and use the hot tub and have a drink and then go back into town, because we’re only 40 minutes away.”

Sometimes, an entire home hinges on one focal point: a bay window, a dramatic staircase, a complicated bit of masonry. In this case, it’s a painting. Greg and Tracey Tuthill were at Maine Art Hill in Kennebunk when they saw a canvas that struck exactly the right chord. Like many of Craig Mooney’s works, it’s a dramatic scene: a seascape with frothy clouds, the Atlantic dark and vast. “It reminds me of being on top of Cadillac Mountain at dawn,” says Tracey. “But really it could be anywhere in Maine, and I love that. I didn’t want the house to be filled with seashells. I wanted it to reflect different seasons and different parts of Maine.”

The large canvas became a jumping-off point for the interior design of the Tuthill’s new coastal cottage near Goose Rocks Beach. Although the couple had been coming to Maine for over 20 years, this renovation represented a new chapter for them. “The old house had its charms,” says Tracey, “but we wanted to have something that was less of a beach house and more of a house-house.” They wanted to create a home that would be sturdy yet airy. They wanted to be able to visit in winter and kindle a fire (which meant they needed some fireplaces, plus new spray-foam insulation and windows). Tracey wanted to reflect a bit of their shared history with the state, and Greg, a sailor, wanted to see some nods to his nautical life. And they really wanted a bathroom upstairs.

Designed by architectural designer Erik Peterson and built by Creative Coast Construction, the compact house fits a lot into its 1,400 square feet. There are three bedrooms and two bathrooms, plus a living area, kitchen, and a bump-out dining room with huge windows that go down to the floor. “It’s so nice not to have to eat in the kitchen,” says Tracey. “That area used to be a deck, so turning it into a dining room gave us this yummy extra space.” Peterson adds that it is “essentially a glass room” that lets light pour into the blue and gray living space.

Light, he explains, was key to the overall success of the project. Usually, when we call a room “airy,” we’re talking about several qualities, the most important of which is size. But small spaces can feel open, bright, and free—if they’re designed properly. Although the cottage was always going to face the woods, there were ways to maximize indirect natural light. On the north side of the house, Peterson added cottage-style stacked windows to illuminate the staircase, and he kept the overall floor plan fairly open. When you walk in, you’re welcomed into the living area, which flows into the kitchen and turns toward the dining room. Tucked at the back of the house are the rooms for the Tuthill’s two grown children. “There’s a public zone and a private zone on the first floor, and it doesn’t cross over,” Peterson explains. “I think the house ended up zoned really well.”

While they were able to free up space by tearing out the centralized spiral staircase and replacing it with a more traditional setup, there still wasn’t a lot of wiggle room for builder Jonathan Trudo and his team. Not only did every board have to fit just so, but they also needed to plan ahead to ensure everyone’s safety. “With a house that size, you’re confined. You can’t take a board, put it on a saw, and swing it around without wiping someone out,” he says. “They take just as long as big houses because you have to do a lot of the work outside and then run back inside.” Plus, he adds, much of the construction was done during a pandemic. “It’s a hard thing to try and coordinate, to keep everyone not overlapping too much,” Trudo recalls. “Somehow I managed to do that over there even with COVID. That was interesting, now that I think about it. Not top of my fun list.”

However, Trudo did enjoy working with the architectural detailing Louise Hurlbutt added to the mix. After the Tuthills had Peterson draw up plans, they contacted Hurlbutt, whose signature style they knew well. “In the dining room, I added some old-world charm with the nickel-gap,” Hurlbutt explains. “It’s an old-world cottage, and to achieve that, we had to fine-tune some things,” like making sure the railing on the stairway matched the engineered floors. Trudeau calls this nitty-gritty stuff “the most fun part” of the project. He says, “I like doing that kind of detailed work. Upstairs, you have all those interesting angles with the roof to work with, which means a lot of problem-solving.” Hurlbutt also selected shutters (to add a layer of privacy to those big windows) and picked out the gray-toned floors. “In a house so close to the water, it’s a really good idea to have engineered flooring,” she says. Hard-wearing sisal rugs in the living room add a bit of visual texture to the mix while adding another dose of classic nautical style.

Overall, the idea was to create a space that would be cohesive and cheerful without feeling overly beachy or kitschy. For Hurlbutt and the Tuthills, color was key. “When you have a house this open, it’s so important that everything works together,” Hurlbutt says. After seeing the Mooney painting they had selected for the place of honor in the living room— “one of the few places that can accommodate a bigger work in that house,” adds Hurlbutt—she put together a palette of oceanic blues and grays, with the occasional splash of dreamy aqua. “We selected the countertops and tiles first,” Hurlbutt says, “then came the paint and textiles.” In the kitchen, she chose a Blue River granite with a leathered finish and, using colors found naturally in the stone, she selected a handmade porcelain tile in slate blue. “Leathered granite is good because it doesn’t scratch, and in this case, it looked just like the rocks at the beach. We were excited to see that,” Hurlbutt says. In the bathrooms, she chose slightly more dramatic tiles, installing two abstract marine mosaics, one upstairs, one down. “The one in our bathroom upstairs looks like a wave,” enthuses Tracey. “I love to see it. The blues are all so beautiful.”

While there aren’t many places to hang art, Hurlbutt did find ways to add interest to the refined design: an oar placed over a bed here, a couple of medium-size coral prints there, and a whole lot of plush, soft textiles. In the owners’ suite, there’s a striking pair of blue and white Kashmir delft pillows from Raoul Textiles in California. “My daughter helped pick those out,” says Tracey. “She’s very visual, and she knew right away those would look amazing with the rug Louise chose.” Throughout the cottage, Hurlbutt and her clients layered various patterns, from stripes to ikat to paisley, all in the same color scheme. The overall effect is calming and welcoming. More dreamy than beachy, like walking into a cloud.

Finally, to light the family’s revamped getaway, Hurlbutt selected three large chandeliers from Visual Comfort. In the dining room, there’s a classic candelabra shape with a bit of curly modern flair. The living room has an undulating metal f ixture that reminds one of a whirlpool—another nod to the water nearby. And above the stairs hangs a many-pointed large Moravian star. “I love that stairwell,” says Tracey. “It’s so beautiful. It’s so light. The entire house is so cheerful now.” Now, instead of simply spending summers by Goose Rocks, the family is coming up more often. “We were just up in the winter, and there was something about the quietness,” says Tracey. “It’s just comfortable.”

What kid hasn’t been occasionally booted out of their room onto a La-Z-boy in the den to accommodate their parents’ overnight guests? It’s a small childhood indignity, but one we usually accept with a roll of the eyes and a shrug. For Jessica McKeon, however, this situation felt more like the norm than an infrequent inconvenience. “I never had a room of my own, and it was never just us,” she says. “Since my sister and I had the nicest room, we’d be kicked out regularly to sleep on a sofa somewhere.”

McKeon grew up in a converted Maryland barn with four siblings and parents who were active in their church community. Her mom and dad often foster-parented juvenile boys and, since they also functioned as counselors for their congregation, took in church members who were going through marital or familial difficulties. They also rescued animals. If a duck abandoned her eggs, McKeon’s parents would bring them home and hatch them in the fireplace.

So, when she and her husband, Paul, went looking for an oceanside escape from their busy life in Portsmouth, McKeon says, “I had been dreaming of a space of my own.” They looked up the coast but decided they would use their retreat less if it were farther away. When she happened upon a listing for a cottage on Pepperrell Cove, just ten minutes from their condominium across the bridge in New Hampshire, she was intrigued.

The cottage had been built in the 1890s and sat right on the harbor, but that was not the main attraction. It came with what at one time was a lobster shack built on stilts right over the water. The structure had gone through many renovations since then, at one time serving as a boathouse, but was then being used as a utility shed and workshop. “The moment I saw the listing I wondered if this might be the private room I dreamed of,” remembers McKeon. “Seeing it in person confirmed it for me.”

“My husband said I could put a foldout couch in it,” she continues. “But I didn’t want it used for a bunkhouse or a guest room. I shared a room with my sister. I had my first daughter at 21. Once you get married and have kids, you share everything.” A room of her own was so important, in fact, that rather than tackling the main house first, the couple began by renovating the tiny 300-square-foot outbuilding into a “she shed,” as McKeon calls it. (It’s also referred to as “Jessie’s BoHo,” short for “boathouse.”)

The couple met with their architect, Brendan McNamara, and designer Diane Hart to sketch out a plan. “Brendan was skeptical about the mold, moisture, and mildew,” recalls Hart. “So I came up with doing all-wood walls and ceiling, treating it like a boat, but not in an obvious Maine-themed way.”

McNamara also points out the challenge of the miniscule proportions. Because it dates to at least World War II by his estimation, many grandfathered aspects—not least its position right on the water—would be lost. “We couldn’t expand the volume or make substantial changes in its appearance,” he says. “So, you have to make the most of the interior. That was when we decided to cathedralize the ceiling,” to give the space a sense of height and openness. This required a tie rod system to hold the walls together under the weight of the new ceiling.

The existing bathroom was “pretty terrible,” McNamara recalls, so it was reconfigured. The shack had a utility sink that was also moved, becoming the sink in a new entertaining bar. “We changed the windows to maximize the view,” he explains, adding larger spans to the east toward the sunrise and a full wall of accordion doors out to the deck and dock. There was a public dock to the west, so, says McNamara, “those windows are higher to maintain privacy.”

All this, points out builder Bill Brown, required measures “to get it stabilized so it would hold up for another 50 years. We needed engineered lumber beams, especially over the doors to the deck because that opening was 12 feet long.”

Inside, Brown stripped all the quarter-inch paneling and replaced it with Hart’s choice of hickory wood. “I wanted to balance the boathouse idea with Jessica’s personality,” explains Hart. “From the moment I met her I was mesmerized by her elegance, poise, and grace. She reminded me of an English royal.”

To address that side of the aesthetic scale, Hart punctuated the room with glamorous lighting. Though not obvious from the gold finishes, the lighting actually relates to the nautical theme. The chandelier over the sitting area reminded Hart of an osprey’s nest, while the pendant over the bar is shaped like a boat. Had this subtle relation not been there, this level of sparkle and elegance might have looked out of place.

As it is, they feel in harmony with the natural materials. “We wanted to keep it pretty organic,” says Hart. “It’s all natural materials, like the hickory and tile floor, which are made of tumbled limestone in a worn-looking Moroccan pattern so it feels like it has been here for a long time.”

McKeon planned to use it as a place to sit and contemplate, where she could read and write poetry. “I can’t be distracted,” she says of her writing. “It has to come from someplace deep inside you, and you need to be quiet and still.” But she also hosts gatherings for her girlfriends in the she shed. Both of these necessitated a lot of function be built into the space.

Books—about art, poetry, literature (particularly German literature, which McKeon studied in college)—are obviously an important presence in her life. The solution? Below the west-facing windows is a wall-to-wall bookcase. On the opposite wall, carpenter Jamie Gowing designed and built a collapsible table where McKeon can peruse books, look out at the water, and when the spirit moves, write.

For entertaining, open shelving by the bar holds glassware, and parallel countertops of a stunningly figured Michelangelo marble offer prep surfaces for snacks and hors d’oeuvres (beneath one counter are refrigerated beverage drawers).

It’s quite a transformation. From the water, it looks like many of the cedar shingle-clad lobster shacks and boathouses dotting the cove. The only hint of its role as a place to nurture female energies is a sculpture of an apple on the deck. There are also apples inside —an allusion, McKeon observes mischievously, to Eve and the Garden of Eden.

“I’m trying to be more deliberate about how I spend my time,” says McKeon, who got a “wake-up call” nine years ago when she required open-heart surgery. “It’s a gift for me, this space. It’s so hard to listen in your ordinary routine. I come here to listen—to the ducks, the water, the trees, and to what’s going on in myself.”