The property wasn’t perfect, because no property is, but it was located on the edge of the southern Maine shore, looking out toward the Atlantic. “Breathtaking” is how the homeowner describes it: “We knew it would be a shame not to highlight that view as much as possible.” Although there had previously been a house on the plot, they needed something more modern for their family of four, especially since they were planning to make the Maine house their permanent residence. And when it came down to it, the site of their new home wasn’t special just because of its proximity to the water or the scent of its surrounding pine forests. If home is where the heart is, this place had to be home.

“My husband’s family has ties to Cape Elizabeth and this area since the 1970s, and his parents put down permanent roots in 1996 when they purchased the property and created a family estate,” explains the homeowner. “We got married here, and we’ve been bringing our girls here since they were infants. When the opportunity arose during the pandemic to make this area our permanent home, we jumped on it.”

There was one snag: the property already had a cottage. It wasn’t quite suitable for year-round family living, so the couple decided to pick it up and move it. This change of location sparked a second critical decree in the design brief: the new home had to honor the old.

This wasn’t a problem for the design-build team at Fine Lines Construction in Freeport, who had worked on many similar residential projects in their 30 years in business. While many styles have come and gone during that time, the plan was to make this house feel relatively timeless by relying on a New England standard. According to architectural historian Vincent Joseph Scully, shingle style is “the architecture of the American summer,” as iconic as boat shoes and baseball. In many ways, these rambling, whimsical structures were made to match the almost-wild, nearly tamed look of the predominant landscaping of the period. Cottage gardens, with their fluffy perennial beds and tangled arbors, looked their best when paired with a slightly flamboyant (but clearly rustic) home. Fine Lines president Ted Andrews looked to the neighbors for inspiration with this contemporary version. “We wanted to pick up on the context of the local architecture,” he explains. “This house reflects the shingle styles of Cape Elizabeth, and all the details you see on the outside were already established on other properties.” It was important for everyone involved that this house feel “consistent.” The first plans for the house were drawn up by Cape Elizabeth– based architect Ted Haffenreffer, who ensured that the property would be appropriately situated within the predetermined constrictions. “The house is hitting the setbacks on three corners, so it is very tight,” explains Andrews. “Haffenreffer got his head around that, and we subsequently got it properly laid out by surveyors, so we were able to wiggle it right up against the lines.” The homeowners wanted enough space for their teen daughters to have their own bedrooms, and for an office, screened porch, generous living area, and ready-to-entertain kitchen. “If we could have taken the entire building and grown it by 5 percent, this build would have been much easier,” says Ben Duplissis, president at Fine Lines. “But it’s all squeezed in, and that was a challenge.” Getting the exterior right was a little easier because they had plenty of references from which to draw. “From the outset, our clients wanted to honor the cottage that was there before,” says Andrews. “It was a funky old thing. It had a faceted den room on the east side. We decided we’d put that element right back in the same way.” The hexagonal room they built isn’t an exact replica of the original home’s library: the size and height differ. Fine Lines employed similar, painstaking construction techniques to ensure the siding was woven together “just so.” Andrews says, “The siding took a long time on this house, because there is a lot of siding, and also because it needed finesse and skill. There’s a flare that ties together with the roof trim, and the steep roof was critical to getting the second-floor spaces we needed.”

Since the house is located by the water, drainage was a consideration, as was rain damage. They moved the house outside the flood zone (by raising it two-anda- half feet), installed a redundant pump system (two pumps at different elevations), and paid particular attention to waterproofing the windows. “We used premium Marvin Signature series windows,” says Duplissis. “The way we install them on coastal homes is different from how you might elsewhere. We’re making sure that any window susceptible to wind-driven rain is sealed on all four sides.” Andrews adds that the roof shingles were chosen purposefully as well. “Asphalt shingles are very problematic on the shore now, and they didn’t used to be. But it’s the wind. This house has already been through about three or four storms of the century, and details that would have worked in the 1980s don’t work now.” Decades of data have been collected on how homes perform in extreme weather, and new products are coming on the market all the time to ensure that contemporary structures can stand for a longer time than ever before. “Ben would say, we want these houses to behave themselves out there. And it’s essential that they don’t fail,” adds Andrews. “There’s a lot of effort from the carpenters, all the way up.”

As a result, the house is superinsulated and extremely quiet. “We joke that we’re so close to the ocean, but if you shut all the windows you’d never know it,” says the homeowner. “These storms have been like putting the house into the L.L.Bean product testing lab, and it passed with flying colors.” For the residents, the house’s success is about more than its practical concerns (and its public-facing good looks). It’s also about the comfortable, stylish, inspired interior. “We have to give so much credit to Liz,” says the homeowner. The “Liz” in question is Liz Kirby of Surf Road Interior Design, who came on the project fairly early, back in 2021, and helped tweak the floor plan and layout before delving into design matters. As a Cape Elizabeth native, Kirby had known the homeowners previously and was excited to work with her old school friend.

“They wanted something coastal, almost leaning toward nautical,” she explains. “They wanted to capture the sense of location, so that being in these rooms would be like getting sprayed by seawater.” One of the most visible ways that Kirby drew from the landscape is through her choice of paint colors. “Their family also has a cottage at Roque Island, and we put nods to that throughout, including with the paint color in the office. It matches the color on the floors at Roque.” Part of her job involved taking the ideas from the couple—like a desire for lighting made from a ship’s wheel—and finding thoughtful, classic alternatives. The brass lighting throughout the home evokes antique ships without being kitschy. Kirby also used woven material (reminiscent of rope or netting) to add a touch of organic softness. For the bathroom cabinets and the furniture, she sourced “white-leaning woods” that would call to mind driftwood. A coffee table inlaid with oyster shells came from Home Remedies in Portland and helped round out the living room set.

Herringbone makes multiple appearances on tabletops, and quartzite counters in pale tones reinforce the beachside theme. The designer says she felt lucky when it came to art selection: the homeowner is an avid photographer and art collector, so Kirby was able to help the couple comb through their works and decide on placement. “That was such a fun thing to do after all the dust had settled,” she says. “[The homeowner] has a very good eye, and he’s willing to get up very early to get the right light. When building it, they spent a lot of time in a rental at Higgins Beach. He got up early to see the surfers, and I think he fell into it.” There were also a few standout pieces that had been passed down through the family, including some oil paintings of the shoreline. “I also convinced them to go with a light blue couch rather than a white one,” she laughs. “It’s better for their family life, and it looks really great.”

In early 2023 the family was able to move into their new dwelling, ready to weather the storms of Maine and enjoy the slanting light of winter. After a year, they’ve broken in the blue couch, figured out the best time of day for outdoor photography, and spent countless hours gazing out at the water from the big windows by the breakfast nook. “We are very lucky, and it’s a very special situation to have your daughters grow up steps away from their grandparents, and also to walk by the place where your parents were married,” says the homeowner. “We really subscribe to longevity, and family is the best prescription.”

Planning for the future, a Massachusetts couple creates an Ogunquit family haven It was a vision into the future,” says Melissa Serlenga of the Ogunquit home she and her husband, Jason, built for their family of two girls and a boy, ages 11 to 17. By this, she means a 4,900-square-foot, six-bedroom legacy retreat that will evolve into a multigenerational getaway as their children grow and start families.

Colby Chase—vice president of Chase Construction, which the Serlengas hired to build the home along with architectural designer Matt Banow—says, “The house on the lot was a very charming 1920s cottage that needed repair beyond what was feasible.” So they razed it and started from scratch. “I pictured a simple house because that’s what you see in Maine,” says Serlenga, who lives full-time with her family in a Boston-area suburb. “I wanted it to flow naturally with the neighborhood.”

Banow’s design response was historically driven. “Stylistically, we took a lot of cues from the work of John Calvin Stevens,” he says, referring to the architect who brought innovation to the shingle style and designed over 1,000 residences in Maine during his lifetime (1855–1940). Banow enumerates some of the hallmarks he adopted from Stevens: “large, prominent gables, double-hung windows, and a lot of stonework.”

Programmatically, explains Chase, “Their big thing was going to the max in terms of entertaining, with large common areas and lots of bedrooms.” Banow adds that central to the design was “creating a private family zone focused on the pool, and physically and visually connecting the spaces to it.” Placing the main house and pool house perpendicularly to create an “L” and connecting them by a bridge on the second floor achieved the desired degree of seclusion from neighbors.

This required a lot of ingenuity, remembers Chase, specifically in terms of how water interacts with all those spaces and drains properly. “There’s lots going on there,” he notes. “The rooflines aren’t the same. When you walk out of the [second-story] primary suite sliders, you’re lower than the [first-story] roof, so we had to pitch the rubber-lined ceiling under the decking without making it look like there was a pitch to anything.”

Banow repeated the “L” idea with the garage on the street-facing front side to create a courtyard effect. Landscape designer Dan Gogan helped link the property to its setting by carrying over azalea and rhododendron plantings “that flow through as one design between this property and the one next door.” He built a 10-foot-wide bluestone walkway to the front door and, in the beds on either side as well as elsewhere, combined specimen plants such as hydrangea, columnar hollies, and Styrax bushes. Gogan sprinkled in “a lot of ornamental grasses, sedums, and other plantings that fit the beach setting.”

The bigger issue, however, was the steep incline of the land, especially at the study end of the house to the southwest. “That side door had an eight-foot drop to the ground, with an oak tree they wanted to save,” Gogan recalls. The study also offered a slice of water view that had to be preserved. So he designed a retaining wall that creates a patio that wraps around the house from the study to the pool area out back.

Inside the front doors, the traditionally leaning structure quickly fast-forwards to the twenty-first century, starting with the unconventional floor plan. Customarily, the dining room and living room flank the foyer. True to form, the living room, with a bluestone slab fireplace, is indeed to the right as you come in, facing the road and accessing a patio and firepit outside. Uncharacteristically, however, on the left lies the kitchen, which is open to a family room and connects to a screened porch, all of which face the pool. “I consider the right side the winter side of the house, and the left the summer side,” says Serlenga.

“Structurally,” elaborates Banow, “we had a lot of wide-open spans, so we had to use a lot of steel beams.” This support system occurs especially all along the left side of the house, including a 16-foot-long slider that opens from the family room onto the pool.

Serlenga operated as interior designer, taking inspiration from a kitchen she had seen designed by Los Angeles–based Emily Henderson in natural wood, black, and white. “The color scheme ended up being a huge inspiration for this project,” she says. Her palette took material form in white oak, white-painted nickel board, and black accents. The materials are consistent throughout the house but vary from room to room. For instance, nickel board swathes the walls of the primary suite, but in one of the girls’ bedrooms the nickel board covers the ceiling instead, while the walls are covered in a sandcolored grasscloth.

“It’s just a hobby,” says Serlenga about her interest in interior design. “I did a couple of projects before this one—a redo of our house in Massachusetts and a flip of the house next door.” Clearly those experiences emboldened her to make some self-assured choices with finishes, particularly in her selections of tile. In the primary suite, for instance, large-format marble tile covers the walls, while the shower floor features smaller hexagonal tiles; half are gray-veined white marble, and the other half are a honey-colored stone. The rest of the bathroom floor is yet another hexagonal tile (this one larger and more elongated in shape) with brass inserts that form starbursts. The same goes for a guest bath, where Serlenga mixed gray hexagonal tiles on the floor, black hexagonal penny tile on the shower floor, and white chevron-patterned tile on the shower stall’s walls.

Most spectacularly, however, she dressed the kitchen island and the backsplash with slabs of a dramatic Dalmata marble, pairing it with a mix of modern white oak and black cabinetry built by the Webhannet Company, Chase Construction’s cabinetry division. So much black in the kitchen initially gave Serlenga pause, she admits. “I hesitated with the upper cabinets because I wanted it to be light and beachy.” But in the end, the color worked well enough that she repeated it in a wet bar built into the dining room.

Lastly, Serlenga says, she deployed textured fabrics on furniture and, more important, on walls—the sandy grasscloth in one of the girls’ rooms and a tweedy wool in the dining room, for example. “My previous projects had a lot of plaster walls, which were kind of plain,” she says. “Adding this feature makes the structure a decorative place in itself.” It also warmed the open-plan spaces, creating a sense of intimacy that supports family togetherness by creating a cozy feeling even when the house is filled with guests. “We hang out in every room,” Serlenga concludes happily. “We can accommodate everyone, but it doesn’t seem cavernous. We accomplished making it a generational space people will come back to.”

Over a century ago, Maine’s foremost architect designed a summer home to look out over Camden Harbor. It was a fine example of John Calvin Stevens’s signature style: combining stateliness and elegance on a comfortable, human scale and being sensitive to the landscape, in this case oriented to run along the shore and turn the inhabitants’ eyes toward the water. Some years later, the home became part of a family summer enclave, one of three homes sitting side by side, each owned by a sibling. By 2021 it was part of a multigenerational tradition of family gatherings by the water. It was also in great need of a fresh start. “The decision to renovate was simple,” says the current homeowner. “Growing up as a summer kid within a very close family in this house was special because of the carefree life it offered. Walking everywhere, having friends in the neighborhood, and being on the water all contributed to my love for it. But the house was old and mildewy and needed some major love.” Beyond the mildew, the home needed significant electrical and mechanical systems updates—and a floorplan better suited to the present century. Architectural designer Erik Durbas of Erik Durbas Designs, interior designer Linda Banks of Banks Design Associates and Simply Home, and builder Tom Potter of the Potter Building Company transformed what Banks calls “an epic summer cottage that was limping along into this century” into a comfortable, useful, family-friendly home with its historic architectural detail intact.

For Banks, it was a “dream job.” “I think it’s important to say how grateful we were that the homeowner entrusted us all with this very special project,” she says. “We were the custodians of this iconic John Calvin Stevens harborside home, and we all worked incredibly well together to honor the heritage of this timeless beauty. Each and every member of the team worked so closely together to respect the integrity of the property.” “Our goal was to recreate everything back to the way it was,” adds Potter. Most of the original woodwork was retained and restored; when new pieces were needed, his building team went the extra mile to connect the new with the old: “All the new trim we put in we milled ourselves; we got knives made for the cutter to keep it historically accurate.”

While the home’s design and style had aged beautifully, some parts of its plan had ceased to serve modern lifestyles. “We were taking something designed for times gone by into the future, and the way we live in our homes now,” says architectural designer Erik Durbas. The home consisted of two masses: a “big house” containing the formal living and dining spaces downstairs and family bedrooms upstairs, and a “back house” holding a small service kitchen with cramped bedrooms above it. It was built for a time and culture in which live-in staff were more common and homeowners didn’t cook their own meals. “For a modern family that wants to gather on holidays and weekends, we migrate toward our kitchens,” says Durbas. Creating a larger kitchen that would be homey and welcoming required expanding the connector between the masses, which also allowed for more bedroom space above and a better connection between the home’s interior and the outdoors via a new covered porch. In both volumes, en suite bathrooms were added to most of the bedrooms, another nod toward modern preferences.

There was, says Banks, some level of “push me, pull you” in finding the right balance between deference to history and modern comfort. For example, a plan for an elevator that would have eased aging in place was scrapped because it would have disrupted the elegant symmetry of the dining room. In other cases, careful planning enabled improvements to both function and style. A coat closet in the foyer became an open wet bar that takes advantage of the harbor view through an arched window; a small office off the dining room became a contemporary pantry where kids can grab drinks on their way through the house. “One of the really big game changers was the expansion of the butler’s pantry,” says Banks. “It connects the foyer and kitchen without having to walk through the formal spaces. It’s used to the max.”

Updating the home’s decor meant building on and repurposing the family’s collection of antique furniture as well as the home’s elaborate trim and millwork. Stevens had incorporated intricate classical-style adornment throughout the home, from fluted columns on the exterior to layered woodwork on the walls. “Each room has its own intimacy, which is a result of the beautiful architectural detailing,” says Banks. “The tiny curved windows, special layered mouldings, layered fireplace surrounds—much of it is hard to reproduce today.” Banks offset these rich details with leavening colors, fabrics, and shapes. “We worked hard to make the house light and airy, to embody a carefree summerhouse feeling,” she says. Instead of heavy draperies, for example, she started with plain ivory linen and added patterned trim that echoes other fabrics in the room, creating a sense of connection without looking fussy (and, she points out, at a far lower cost than using a patterned fabric for the whole yardage). She had some of the less precious furniture painted, replacing dark wood with cheerful nautical hues. Rugs and fixtures were chosen to add a breezy, comfortable style amid the more old-fashioned elements. Art collected by the family over the years was reframed, replacing heavy, ornate frames with a clean museum-style look. “It changed the whole mood from somber to full of life,” says Banks.

“Full of life” could be applied to not only the paintings but the home as a whole. With all its historic and architectural weight, the house is no museum, but a place for a family to gather and grow. Linda Banks recalls first visiting the house with project manager Dave LeBlanc in 2021, when the stately dining room was serving as an at-home school for family and neighbors. “The first blustery day we visited the property during lockdown, all masked up, Dave and I knew what a special assignment this would be. We could see the potential through the desks, books, art supplies, and alphabet garland adorning the dining room fireplace.” Two years later, the home was ready to welcome the family back, freshly prepared to hold more generations of life. “Postrenovation, what I especially love is how the house maintains its beautiful charm and memories while being updated with modern amenities,” says the homeowner. “My hope for the future of the home is that my kids and grandkids will have those experiences and make the same memories I made, while valuing family and our love for each other.”