The house was perfectly serviceable—lovely, even. Perched on a ridge in Blue Hill, the white modern farmhouse seemed to float a little above the surrounding landscape. But that was the problem for the homeowners, David and Jeannet Leendertse. “When we built the original house, we didn’t have money to blast, so when we ran into a ledge, it ended up sitting higher than we anticipated,” says Jeannet. For nearly 15 years, they lived with this upright structure, thinking about ways to bring it down to earth. In 2020 they decided to do something about it. They would build an expansion, one that would ground the property, create two spacious workshops, and provide fresh inspiration for the artists.

From the beginning, “they were super involved clients,” says Matt Elliott of Elliott Architects, who worked alongside architect Isaac Robbins and associate Maggie Kirsch to design the compact compound. “They were willing to talk about ideas and listen to ours, but they also had a really strong view of what they wanted,” he continues. David and Jeannet knew how they wanted the space to feel, and they knew how they wanted it to function. “Everybody understood it was going to take a team to pull it off,” agrees builder David Gray of David W. Gray Carpentry. “There was no room for anything but helping each other out.”

It’s not that the drawings were incredibly complicated; it was the opposite. After consulting with David and Jeannet, the architects turned to vintage agrarian building practices for potential ideas. “In Maine in particular, there is a history of having connected outbuildings. It’s the big house, little house, back house, barn,” explains Elliott. “That influences a lot of our work. What we like about that is that you can take a large amount of space and break it into smaller pieces, bringing it down to a human scale.” These buildings would get moved around on the site, depending on the needs of the farmers. The spacing of the structures also created a series of microclimates, which helped keep livestock warm in the winter and shield plants from too much wind or sun in the summer. “With this build, we were trying to do something similar, but in a more connected way,” says Elliott.

The team at Elliott Architects landed on a simple expansion, with two new spare and structural buildings linked by a metal canopy, which would create a courtyard/carport and thus totally change how the homeowners (and their guests) approach the main house. “It’s always very important to us to think about the sequential narrative of coming to the house and arriving,” says Kirsch. “Before, you just drove up to a large empty space and parked. Now, there is an entire sequence, from the courtyard to the canopy to the glass connector.” Kirsch adds, “We really love the spaces where you are either outside and you feel covered, or you’re inside and you feel connected to the outside.”

To further create a sense of connection with the land, they decided to embed one of the studios (David’s) into the hillside. Inspired by nineteenth-century bank barns, the building is spacious and rustic, with hardwood oak floors, plywood wall panels, and exposed steel beams. “It’s not your typical workshop,” says Gray, who reveals that David’s woodshop was, in fact, the trickiest part of the build, due mainly to the two-story sliding doors but also thanks to the wide-open interior and hanging canopy. “The structural work, with all that steel—I had never done anything like that, and I’ve been in business for 30 years,” Gray continues. “Typically, all the steel is covered and never to be seen again. But with this build, you see every bit of it.” Since there are no load-bearing columns in the main workspace, the steel beams were necessary to hold up the roofing—and to bear the weight of the snow that’s bound to come each year. Framing around the pocket doors was also a difficult task. “But those came out big-time cool,” Gray says. “Everyone involved had extremely high expectations, and I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, but I don’t think every company could have pulled that off.”

Although Jeannet’s white-box studio appears simpler than David’s rustic and elegant workshop, it too required precision and excellence. “[Elliott Architects] were very good with the negative spaces. No matter where you stand, the three buildings relate to each other in a beau- tiful way,” reflects Jeannet. She calls the overall build a “sculptural” achievement that puts elements of the landscape—the treeline, the boulders, the hilltop itself—into direct conversation with the built environment, not only through the siting of the studio but also through the careful placement of windows. As David puts it, “Outside, it is truly a wall of green. If you stand anywhere in Jeannet’s studio and look, the trees are the same distance away. It embraces the house. It’s always alive. The trees are always moving in the wind. It’s dynamic but calm at the same time.” Jeannet says, “I like to stand by the windows and look out at the boulder in the field. It’s very calming.”

The sculptural studio also facilitates Jeannet’s artistic work through its thoughtful design. Jeannet is a weaver of seaweed, a maker of intricate, often fragile vessels. Her pieces almost appear to be organic expressions of the ocean itself. But every basket and sculpture has been painstakingly worked by hand. “Jeannet’s work is very delicate,” says Elliott. “She wanted very soft, diffuse light in her studio, so we put in a long ribbon of north-facing windows.” Kirsch adds that this “brings in even light, with no strong shadows that would cut through the space,” allowing the artist to focus fully on her absorbing work.

Originally from the shores of the Netherlands, Jeannet has found plenty of inspiration on the Maine coastline. Over the years her practice has evolved and shifted, molded by place and circumstance. (She began working with seaweed more seriously during the COVID pandemic. “We were spending a lot of time outside,” David says.) “Fiber art lends itself to a wide range of experiments,” Jeannet explains. “There are so many different techniques that you can choose from, whether it is stitching, sewing, knitting, or weaving. There are many ways to use material, and many materials that can act as fiber.” In addition to seaweed, Jeannet also works with silk, flax, lichen, and beeswax. “Now that I have the studio,” she says, “it’s great to be able to build larger pieces and have them all in one place.” She uses the large table for weaving and sketching, the pinning wall to display works in progress, the storage space (located behind the pinning wall) for her materials, and the small kitchen for cleaning, drying, and preparing seaweed. “It’s a process that involves buckets of cold water, salts, and all these types of things. When the seaweed is drying, there are some aromas that come with that,” she says. “It’s a little briny. So you can open the windows, and it’s all good.” She’s even brought in a small freezer, so that she can collect seaweed during peak season and save it for later months. “I harvest when it’s best,” she says.

Although construction has long since ended on the home and studios, Jeannet and David admit they’re never quite done. Decorating these gracious, peaceful spaces is an ongoing process. David is still polishing his woodworking skills, and Jeannet is still aiming for visual harmony—in all aspects of the place. “My idea has been to move very slowly,” she says. “To live in it, and slowly get a feel for it. I’m making some pieces myself for the house.” In one hall- way hangs a dark blue piece made from beeswax and silk, with a deep green basket placed nearby. “I think it’s nice to make place-specific pieces,” muses Jeannet. “I think it’s inspiring to think about the light, the architecture, and think: what does it need here?”

Samantha Pappas understands the power of home. The decorator recently completed an extensive renovation and expansion of her own Yarmouth residence, and the experience was far more transformative than she could have ever imagined. “The house started to feel small after my husband and I had our third child, so we eventually decided to gut it and create our dream home,” explains Pappas. “Then, a few weeks after moving out to begin construction, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. It totally rocked our world. I couldn’t believe that I had just torn my house apart and committed to such a huge project.” But committed they were, and in time Pappas actually began to view the timing as a blessing in disguise. “I was able to visit the house on the way to and from treatments and doctor appointments, which allowed my mind to focus on something other than being sick,” explains Pappas. “I found energy through my work and dreaming about how amazing being back in my space would feel.”

Rather than find an entirely new property, it was important to the couple—who relocated to Maine from Florida in 2015—that they remain in their beloved neighborhood and in the house that they had built not that long ago in 2017. In fact, it was the original construction project that pushed Pappas to launch her design career. “I actually studied civil and structural engineering, but I didn’t love working as an engineer,” says Pappas. “I’ve always been interested in art and design, and I fell in love with the process of building and decorating our house. After that I began helping friends and neighbors, and the business kept evolving in an organic way.”

After having lived in the abode for several years, the couple was clear on the main objectives for its latest incarnation: an additional bed and bath upstairs, a proper entry, a larger living room, and a new kitchen with plenty of storage. To assist with this, Pappas called on architect Kevin Browne, with whom she had worked on a past project. All in all, they added about 1,000 square feet between a cross gable upstairs, the newly built entry and adjacent living room, and the incorporation of an existing covered porch into the kitchen. “We rearranged the entire first floor with the exception of the primary bedroom,” explains Browne. “We moved the kitchen to the other side of the house and situated the living room where there’s more privacy and views. This opened up much more space for the dining area, too.” The stairwell also needed to be reconfigured as a result of tweaking the layout. “In order for the kitchen to function, we transformed what was a U-shaped staircase into a straight design and then collaborated with Samantha on the wood slat detail to conceal it,” says Browne. “It ended up being a cool feature.”

These strategic changes, according to Pappas, make a huge difference in how the house operates. “Previously we were forced to store so many items, from games to serving pieces, in the basement,” she recalls. “Now everything is readily accessible, and the entire home functions much better for our family. I love to cook and entertain, so my favorite place is the kitchen. There’s a 13-foot island with a 5-foot sink that’s perfect for prep, a custom coffee bar, and double the amount of pantry space from our previous kitchen.” If the family isn’t in the kitchen or having one of their daily dance parties, chances are they are hanging out in the new living room, complete with a fireplace, a pair of comfortable sofas to pile onto for movie nights, a large coffee table for playing games, a reading nook, and a piano. “I grew up playing piano, and now my daughter is taking lessons, so it was important that the new layout include a spot for that,” says Pappas. “It brings me so much joy and floods my mind with really fond memories.” Adjacent to the living room is the new entry, which is decked out with plenty of storage, a durable cement tile floor laid in a checkerboard pattern, and an unexpected pop of high-gloss purple on the ceiling. “Our old front door opened right onto the main living area, so there was nowhere for guests to drop their things,” recalls Pappas. “We installed two large coat closets as well as a bench with coat hooks above and cubbies below for the kids’ shoes.”

But the layout isn’t the only dramatic change. “My aesthetic has progressed,” notes Pappas. “There was a lot of white pre-renovation, but I didn’t want any white this go-around—and not only because I didn’t want to worry about my kids touching everything. I was influenced by the colors and textures of the outdoors and the serenity that comes along with that. There’s natural wood, dark blues, and earthy shades of brown and green as well as more unexpected pops of color, such as the purple found in the entry, inside the kitchen display cabinet, and on the powder room vanity.” Not to mention the floral touches on the walls of two of the bathrooms and on her older daughter’s bedroom ceiling. “She loves going to flower shops with me, making arrangements, and helping in our garden, so this ceiling is a fun nod to that,” explains Pappas, who chose a moody green for her son’s room and a soft peach for her younger daughter’s. Meanwhile, the primary bedroom on the main floor is a serene sage. “I like playing with color and pattern while maintaining a comfortable, calming feel. I don’t want my spaces to be overdone, but I don’t want them to be boring or stale either.”

It’s no wonder that Pappas has a way with palettes, given that she paints and creates mixed-media work in her spare time. “I’ve always enjoyed drawing and painting as a hobby,” she says. Some of her pieces are scattered throughout the residence, including a pair of paintings in the primary bedroom, a framed textile with quartz dominos representing her wedding anniversary off the kitchen, and a deer hide (her husband’s score) that she mounted on a textile above the piano in the living room. She also enjoys collecting works by other artists near and far. “The beauty of art is that it doesn’t need to match the interiors,” says Pappas. “If a piece speaks to us, it will fit. Art is something that you can continue to curate over time, and it adds another layer to a space.”

The furnishings are a mix of contemporary items, vintage finds, and a few select pieces that had been in the house before—namely, the custom dining table from Huston and Company in Kennebunkport with the children’s names and handprints underneath. Another sentimental detail is the rug in the kitchen, which Pappas purchased while visiting her sister in England years ago and that has found its way into each of her homes since. “I’m in love with how it all came together,” says Pappas. “When we moved back into the house I had just two chemotherapy sessions left, and I felt such a sense of calm and peace in my soul. It made me realize how important a well-designed space is. Waking up every day in a room that’s soothing and cozy gave me the mental strength that, in turn, helped me physically. I think the entire family sensed a much-needed breath of fresh air. And every time I walk into this home, cook dinner in my new kitchen, or have a family movie night, I feel like I’m healed more and more.”

It’s common wisdom that well-considered decisions take time. That’s one reason real estate agents and design professionals advise home buyers to live in their new abode for a while before embarking on any major alterations. Bebe Schudroff and her husband gave the process of considering a full renovation ample time … approximately 30 years in fact.

“The house really wasn’t our style,” Schudroff admits of the 5,065-square-foot structure perched on a bluff of Kennebunkport oceanfront, which has been their summer getaway from Connecticut for the past three decades. “But the view was so breathtaking that my husband said, ‘We don’t even have to go inside. I’ll buy it.’”

The house is composed of three connected sections: a middle structure that is parallel with the shoreline and two wings that angle away from the water to partially enclose a circular, land-facing car court. That meant the rear of the house can take in 180-degree views of the water. Yet inside the residence did little to optimize these vistas. “The windows were small,” Schudroff explains, “and there were walls that blocked the windows. Little by little, we added new floors and other things. But finally, we thought it was time and decided to do the whole thing over.”

The couple are collectors of works with a bright, Pop Art sensibility—particularly by Peter Max, who is a personal friend of theirs from the 1970s—and they had filled the house with a good amount of it. Yet the dark interiors did not lend themselves to showcasing the collection as handsomely as their modern home in Connecticut did. “I love everything contemporary,” Schudroff says. “Lines have to be clean. I’m not into decorated looks.”

An internet search led them to Falmouth-based modernist architect Carol A. Wilson, and seeing a project she had done on nearby Goose Rocks Beach sealed the deal. “Carol is just amazing,” says Schudroff. “She envisioned the whole thing as soon as she walked in the door.” “It was an old shingle house that was dark and closed down, with lots of smaller rooms, and you didn’t see the views,” remembers Wilson. “This project was about creating spaces for them to show the art they love, which has a very colorful, graphic sense to it. So we opened it up and painted it white.”

It was, of course, a bit more involved than that. Wilson rarely takes on renovations, preferring to design and build houses from the ground up. “When you start renovating an old house,” she observes, “it gets complicated because you get odd spaces. We had to be cognizant of the existing structure,” which was everything one might have expected from a 1969 home (complete with the olive green refrigerator, Schudroff points out). Though Wilson reused certain areas, such as the sunken living room, others changed radically, none more so than the old formal dining room.

“It’s not a very rational house,” notes Wilson, “and if you know anything about modern architects, we are very rational.” The kitchen and dining room abutted right at the point where the main structure (containing the dining room) met one of the angled wings (the kitchen). The kitchen itself was walled off from the single-story dining room, creating peculiar planar jogs at the corners of that space.

Wilson appropriated the large walk-in closet of the primary suite above the old dining room to convert the space into a light-filled double-height lounging area with two bands of generously proportioned glass doors and windows overlooking the sea. She demolished the wall separating kitchen and dining room, transforming them into one vastly expanded open plan, and she also had enormous windows installed in the kitchen to optimize the light and vistas. The absence of the interior wall now deflects attention from the odd way the house bends back away from the shore, replacing it with an airy sense of continuous, fluid flow.

The second floor, which accommodates the primary suite and two guest rooms (there are another two downstairs), had formerly been accessed by a stairway behind the kitchen. But Wilson designed a new, modern staircase with a metal rail and open risers to ensure transparency for views and situated it at the other end of the house, giving the primary suite private access and leaving the old stair for reaching the guest rooms. This posed a tricky maneuver for Geoffrey Bowley, principal of Bowley Builders, in addition to the rigorous nature of modern architecture, where the desire for clean lines precludes ornamentation that can hide imperfect meeting points. “There’s nowhere to hide,” says Bowley, “no mouldings, no baseboards. Everything had to be coplanar. That puts a high focus on finished elements.”

Another challenge for Bowley was the primary suite bathroom, where mahogany slats on the ceiling continue down walls as cladding. “How all those slats laid out was given a lot of consideration,” he says. “How everything was going to align was done with incredible attention to detail. Every square inch had to be just so.”

White oak floors throughout enhance the sense of continuous flow from one space to the next, and gallery-style white walls make the art collection pop. Another friend of Schudroff, Natalie Marten, whom she had met years ago in the fashion business (when Schudroff was a designer for Calvin Klein), had helped her with the interiors of the Connecticut house. “I knew the house through our friendship, before it was transformed,” says Marten of the Kennebunkport home, where she had stayed on many occasions. “It was very old-school, though the modern element of the art was always there.” Marten saw her task as designing interiors that would allow the art and the views to speak loudest. After all, it’s hard to compete with powerhouse art by Robert Motherwell (another personal friend and neighbor), Andy Warhol, the afore- mentioned Max, Amy Cordova, and James Havard, as well as individual works by Schudroff herself.

“Bebe loves turquoise and green, which was perfect with the ocean,” says Marten. These colors show up in upholstery for custom sofas throughout the house, in everyday dishware, and in ceramic Buddha heads in a bathroom. Some colors were pulled directly from the artworks in individual rooms. For instance, at the nexus between kitchen and lounging area is an Arne Jacobsen Swan chair upholstered in deep purple, which is the background color of a graffiti-like painting by Schudroff above it. The green of a custom sectional sofa can also be seen in the James Havard painting that hangs above it. Much of the furniture was from Ralph Lauren’s prolific collections. The high-gloss polished mahogany headboard with built-in tables in the primary suite is just one example. “It’s a throwback to the 1940s era,” says Marten, which she ramped up with silver elements. A downstairs bedroom that she describes as “an ode to Americana with a beautiful vintage feeling” is appointed with Ralph Lauren wicker furniture.

Within the newly opened-up, naturally lit rooms, concludes Marten, “It was really about taking treasures they’ve collected and loved over the years and creating vignettes throughout the home.”