What if, as you were daydreaming and plotting your new home, you thought not about the building but its ruins? What if you imagined what had stood before—and how good it was while it lasted?

Caleb Johnson did this while creating his pocket-sized family home in coastal Biddeford. For the lifelong architect-builder, a conversation with materials is the point, and his home is proof of that perspective: it’s cedar and oak, walnut and wrought iron. Johnson loves materials, the old-fashioned kind—he isn’t stalking trade shows for plastic-laced composite stone that promises lasting performance. His ideal houses have only a handful of ingredients, no seven-syllable words on their packaging. 

“I think about it like this,” he says. “If a piece of house broke off and washed around in the ocean, would I pick it up or throw it out? I’ll tell you this: I’ve never taken asphalt shingle home with me.”

Architects’ and designers’ own homes are always worth listening to closely. Unfettered by the web of choices that renovation and building present, and unobstructed by committee meetings of client, builder, and homeowner, they’re free to ask and answer meaningful questions, not just, But can it be done by Memorial Day? 

If this 850-square-foot Hills Beach house is the answer, then the questions Johnson asked might be, Why do we build? Who and what is impacted? and What legacy will we leave in its wake? 

The architect first arrived in Biddeford right out of grad school and soon founded a firm under his own name. Now 20-plus years strong, the firm goes by Woodhull and includes half a dozen other principals at its helm. The team has crafted dozens of homes in the region, many in Biddeford, including one for Johnson’s parents, one for his former partner and the children they share, and most recently, this one for Johnson and his partner, Shannon Richards, also an entrepreneur in the design-build world. 

Before he could get to the big questions, Johnson needed to resolve the most obvious challenge: to make a functional, pleasurable base camp for himself, Richards, the six children between them, and, on summer nights, the many neighbors and friends who swing through this tightly knit beach town.

To do so, Johnson enlisted a handful of folks inside the firm, including Woodhull’s head of millwork, Scott Stuart. Richards appointed herself to oversee the interiors. (She runs a design, construction, and real estate services company called Hay Runner.) Together they also tapped artisans and furniture makers to leave their thumbprint (among them sculptor John Bisbee), making nearly everything inside either Maine sourced or Maine made. 

The “junky little house” Johnson found on this special slice of beach would have been torn down by most; it’s more cost effective and less hassle. But Johnson didn’t have the heart to do it. Instead, he set out “to make a really ugly house less ugly,” and to respect the area’s low-key vibe. The limitations of owning a sliver of near-beachfront property inspired ingenious solutions. For example, half of the front deck is actually the top of a picnic table custom made to pony up to the actual deck. Sure, zoning requires a minimum setback for a residence, but it doesn’t say anything about movable picnic tables. 

The back courtyard has space for a pair of cars and, thanks to a framework below the surface, the grass stays buoyant and inviting. When the cars are elsewhere, it’s a verdant party courtyard. Inside, the couple made myriad choices meant to keep things running smoothly when kids are in the mix—and there are up to four school-age ones around, depending on the week. To get the most out of the square footage, the four bedrooms upstairs are sans closets, with bureaus and foot lockers picking up the slack. Downstairs, the choicest shoreline views are granted to the petite sitting area up front; the kitchen holds the middle, and a dining area takes up the rear. 

The tidy open floor plan deftly folds small-space ingenuity alongside material pleasures. The furniture is concentrated on the periphery of the room, and the rest is purposely low-profile. Those seaside sight lines are kept intact, back to front. There are concealed functions  (a TV hides behind the drawn curtains) and double duties (the island has kitchen items on one side and office/homework items on the other). 

The dining area does even more. In lieu of a traditional six-top table is a pair of cafe tables. Pressed together, they seat a crowd; apart, they allow more circulation and access to the banquette’s hidden storage. Richards and Johnson drew the pieces loosely based on a surfboard shape, explains Richards, and then called on a steelworker, a woodturner, and a cabinetmaker for their creation. “And it was all done over text,” she says laughing. 

The conversation around the kitchen took a bit more back-and-forth and a lion’s share of the budget. Still, Johnson reports, “At 850 square feet, I get to do what most clients would cut out.” That includes plaster walls with cloudlike depth owing to hand-troweled textures and natural pale pink and blue hues. That’ll run you three to four times the price of drywall, but here, there’s not much wall space. And now, zero gnarly chemicals. 

For the kitchen, Johnson doubled down on his commitment to integrity and charged Stuart with building a kitchen “that a woodworker would be proud of.” They aligned easily. Like the homeowners, Stuart is endlessly dissatisfied with throwaway culture, which, in kitchens, means particle-board boxes clad in veneer—veneer that chips, stains, and ends up in a landfill far too quickly. 

Stuart set out to build a walnut kitchen with fine-furniture appeal. No plywood, no factory-made fasteners like screws and nails. He even took a trip to the Owl’s Head Transportation Museum to study biplane construction, which taught him how to use solid wood to make large boxes sturdy enough for the hardest working room in the house but light enough to “float” off the floor, so as not to overwhelm the space. 

In total, there are three walnut pieces: upper and lower cabinets as well as an island. (And somewhere there is a hidden compartment, but Stuart won’t let on where it is or what’s inside, though he smiles when he talks about it.) The surfaces are cold-rolled ferrous steel, and the result is a centerpiece of the space and a soapbox for Johnson’s ethos.  

“I find myself fighting against designs and products that are best on the day you put them in. Wood just looks good with wear,” he says. “Already, this kitchen has a few dents and some wear on it, and it’s starting to look like an antique. And, 150 years from now, it’ll be a really prized piece from that wear. Wood is special that way.”

Walnut shows up in the powder room too, in a backsplash Johnson into with a mermaid scene taken off a tracing paper sketch by Richards. He carved window frames too; they surround the grandest windows at the front of the house—the gateway between inside and out, between land and sea. It’s a treasure that, if discovered washed up on the shore, would no doubt be collected and cherished by a beach walker, but to Richards and Johnson, it’s just part of their home.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that a pair of creative professionals would share a “good eye.” “We’re completely mad about antiquing, finding the right things,” says Chris Ross, describing how he and his wife, Alice, have furnished their Portland home with treasures culled from antique shops, Facebook Marketplace, and roadside castoffs. But, beyond seeing beauty in the old, they also seem to be able to spot good ideas ahead of the crowd. In 2014, well before the COVID lockdown sent New Yorkers scrambling for Maine real estate, the Rosses and their two children had left Brooklyn to live and work remotely in Chris’s native Maine. During the early months of the pandemic, while they felt lucky to be so well prepared for work-from-home, they needed something else. “We were going out of our minds being home—we’re used to traveling a lot for photoshoots,” recalls Chris, who previously worked in the media and entertainment industry and has recently focused on painting. “It’s a dream we’ve always had, to have a special place that we can go to.” They spent their nights on Zillow, looking at cabins and cottages, with no luck. “We tried to put in offers and realized very quickly that everyone was coming for them,” says Chris. Finally, they spotted a “really random listing without any photographs of actual land,” and headed to Georgetown to investigate. “We couldn’t believe how beautiful the view was,” says Chris. “We thought, even if we don’t do anything here, we should try to buy this, even if we just camped here for the rest of our lives.” They acted fast and found themselves the owners of a gorgeous piece of waterfront property covered in mossy ledges and old-growth spruce. It was time to turn their artists’ eyes to the building process.

“We kept it really simple—a kid’s drawing of what a house should be, with a peaked roof and a chimney,” says Chris. They took their sketches to Andrew Frederick, an architectural designer then in the early stages of launching Croft, an innovative company that creates structural panels insulated with carbon-capturing compressed straw. Still in the outdoors-only phase of COVID lockdowns, they met on the steps of the Rosses’ Portland house to draft a budget-friendly home that would honor the land it was sitting on. “It is a beautiful place on earth where this building was going to land,” says Frederick. “We didn’t want to swoop in and blast away the beautiful native site in order to build an environmentally sustainable building.” They decided on a treehouse-like structure with a minimal foundation. By drilling directly into the granite ledge of the site and pouring the smallest amount of concrete that would create a flat surface, they were able to use “a tiny fraction of the concrete that is normally found in conventional foundations,” Frederick says. “Concrete has a very high embodied-carbon impact. Anything we can do to minimize the use of it—we are laser focused on that.” 

Embodied (or embedded) emissions are measures of the greenhouse gases created by the materials that go into a building. Many “green building” initiatives focus on the energy a structure uses after it is completed, but Frederick emphasizes that what happens before and during construction should also get attention. “What we make our buildings out of, the physical materials, turns out to be so much more important in terms of environmental impact than how high-performing and efficient that building is,” he says. “The construction and operation of buildings is 40 percent of humanity’s global carbon output every single year; if we solve buildings, we’re halfway done. We can make huge strides in this climate crisis if we just do buildings right.” Unlike conventional forms of insulation, straw takes carbon out of the atmosphere, rather than adding to the building’s carbon footprint; unlike trees, it doesn’t take decades to replace itself. It’s also locally available and inexpensive. “We’re growing so much of it anyway; even if we superinsulated every new home with 16-inch walls, we would use only 10 percent of the wheat straw we will grow anyway, that’s just sitting there as agricultural residue,” says Frederick. “It’s a forehead-slappingly obvious solution. A material that’s plentiful, affordable, and durable, that captures carbon? Use that material; it’s plain as day.” 

Like many good ideas, Frederick’s “forehead-slappingly obvious solution” is less clear to those of us with only normal eyesight, but the perspicacious Rosses were ready to start immediately. On a tight budget, they had decided against taking out a construction loan and hiring a general contractor; instead, they borrowed against their Portland house and managed the project themselves. “It was the thick of supply-chain shortages,” says Chris, but working with local companies helped immensely. The posts, platform, and panels went up quickly; only their windows were delayed. “We had to wrap the house over the window cavities so it was protected from the elements. It had to sit quietly for a while.” They used the time to outfit the interior and install electricity, which is hidden from view. “We didn’t want any big boxes attached to the house, didn’t want to see lines coming in and a thing stuck to the side with a meter,” says Chris. “Everything is channeled in underground. It looks like you’re not connected to the world; there’s nothing penetrating the beautiful siding.” 

With his workload reduced by the pandemic, Chris took the time to learn new crafts and skills. He hand-crafted the bathroom tiles in batches of three, mixing shades of green and brown with the concrete to create a “playful” palette. When they were finished, he went on to learn how to tile: “I made them; I might as well install them and figure it out.” With his new knowledge of concrete, he poured the pad for the woodstove, cutting into the floor so that it would be flush rather than raised, and bringing in the family to put their handprints into it before it hardened. He also covered the bathroom walls using a lime plaster tadelakt technique, following instructional videos on YouTube to create a waterproof, timeless finish.

The Rosses furnished the home primarily with antique and secondhand pieces—some sourced from their own basement, like half of a scrubbed pine table they’d cut to fit their Portland home. A highlight is the Putnam ladder that leads to the sleeping loft. Found at a New Hampshire architectural salvage shop, it was, Chris marvels, “absolutely the exact size we needed.” While the furnishings and finishings are elegant, the Rosses’ skills in secondhand sourcing and willingness to DIY kept the costs down. “We were constantly aware of the budget. Everything came down to budget,” Chris notes. As another way to fund expenses, the couple has made the home, called Moss House, available to rent when they aren’t using it.

All the care that went into the home’s construction and furnishing has the paradoxical effect of turning attention away from itself and toward the woods and waters outside. A wraparound deck extends the home’s small footprint, and the Rosses have made gently shaped paths that lead down to the dock through the moss-covered terrain. To visit Moss House is to have a chance to look through artists’ eyes, to see the land and the water and the trees in a new light. “Moss is one of those things that gets overlooked a lot,” says Chris. “It’s so beautiful and delicate up close.”  

It was three in the morning when Matt Herrington first saw the building that would become his family’s Maine home. From the pictures online, he could tell the coastal structure was in bad shape, but he could also see its immense potential. “It was unlike any other listing,” he recalls. “It was an American ruin. There was no water, no electricity, and the floors weren’t connected.” And yet the old yacht club was clearly “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” He ran upstairs and woke up his wife, Shannon Hart Herrington. “We’re flying to Bangor on Saturday,” he said. 

At the time, the couple (and parents of five) were living in Washington, D.C., but they were looking to make the move north. For years, they had dreamt of relocating to the Pine Tree State, but they wanted to do it right. This meant buying a property that had access to the Atlantic, working with an architect they admired, and hiring a local builder who could do justice to the project. The dilapidated boathouse offered both a challenge and a chance: they could restore, renovate, and remake. They could build something that would last decades, despite the rising tides. They’d need help, and Matt Herrington knew where to look. “I had been stalking Matt Elliott and his practice over the internet for years,” he says. “When I called him, I asked, ‘Have you ever been down to the old yacht club?’ and he said, ‘I’ve been waiting for this call for 25 years.’” 

In some ways, that’s the most remarkable thing about this project. The 100-year-old structure was familiar to many in the Blue Hill community, and there had been talk of restoring the building, but until the Herringtons came along no one was willing to fully commit. Although it had served as a community hub during the early decades of the twentieth century, after World War II the place had sat empty. Water poured into the foundations, the staircase rotted away, and eventually the shifting ground rendered much of the original structure unusable. “With a project like this, it has to be design driven rather than budget driven,” says Herrington. “We knew that going in.” This attitude jibed well with architect Corey Papadopoli’s vision. “We wanted to respect what was old but to make clear what was new,” he explains. “The main goal was to maintain the memory of the historic structure while updating it at the same time.” 

At first, the idea was to lift up the building and work underneath it, but builder Mike Hewes nixed this plan. “Two-thirds of the foundation was in really bad shape,” he explains. “It was set on big granite blocks but also built on six inches to three feet of clay. Which meant it was heaving each winter and then settling back down.” After removing some of the foundation and creating a tunnel below the building, subcontractor Kenny Thompson of Thompson Foundations “took one look and said, ‘I’m not going in there,’” recalls Hewes. “There was a lot of talk early in the process about what we could leave, and I told the team that I wasn’t going to put good work on top of bad.” Instead, they decided to number the timbers and remove them, piece by piece, relocating the salvageable elements of the old yacht club into a storage container on-site. This allowed Blue Hill–based M.E. Astbury and Son to get their excavator under the building to reinforce the existing foundation. Since the Atlantic laps at the base of the building, the basement needed to allow a certain level of water flow. “We had to work with our structural engineer to treat the foundation as a seawall. Instead of putting it on piers, we buttressed it on the inside,” says Papadopoli. “There are also concrete buttresses behind the wall that help resist the lateral force of the ocean. Thankfully, there were some openings in the wall, which we kept and made them permanently open. Instead of filling them in, we put in crushed stone and a network of drainage pipes.” This means that, when the ocean comes crashing up in a storm, the house will allow water to penetrate the basement without damaging the integrity of the home. “It was tested recently,” says Hewes of the brutal 2024 winter storms. “It held up really well.” 

Another major consideration was how to pack so much living into such a constricted space. Papadopoli decided to solve this problem using a combination of highly visible windows and impeccably concealed doors. From the exterior, the supersized glass dormers (imported from Germany) lend a modernist touch to the renovated boathouse, “which allowed us to get more volume into a compressed area,” says Papadopoli. “We also expanded the clubroom onto the deck with sliding glass doors, which gave us a little more footprint. Because it’s covered by the porch it’s not noticeable from the outside, but it makes a huge difference on the inside.” Papadopoli briefly thought about restoring the stuccoing on the outside of the building—though “stucco is an odd choice on the Maine coast,” he notes—before deciding to switch to eastern white cedar. “It’s lower maintenance, and it fits with the character of the region.” 

The interior design brief was similarly focused on merging traditional elements with sleek, contemporary luxury. The living areas have a minimalist, slightly industrial edge that fits with the rustic nature of the salvaged ruins. To let the tones of the wood and stone shine, the homeowners selected a palette of black, white, and gray for the paneling and tiles. “See this?” asks Herrington as he presses a hand to the white nickel-gap wall. “As you can tell, we hate handles, so everything is a touch-latch door.” According to him, the big feat of the project was packing “three en suite bedrooms and a laundry room into one very small upstairs space.” 

Papadopoli explains: “We were able to get everything they wanted into this square footage, but it meant some trade-offs. For instance, we treated the kitchen as a furniture piece rather than a built-in. We also tucked a lot of elements under the stairs.” Hewes and Company installed built-in shelving behind the beds, hidden clothes pegs that reveal themselves with a single push, and clever pockets of storage throughout the two stories. “The whole team really sweated every little detail, and it shows,” says Herrington. “This drifts into neurotic territory, but there are little things, like having a place for the espresso capsules by the coffee bar. That delights me.” The couple also “made a real effort” to use Maine suppliers. The teak soaking tub was sourced from Bath in Wood of Maine on Swan’s Island; the art on the walls was purchased primarily at Cynthia Winings Gallery in Blue Hill; and the roasted birch floors were supplied by AE Sampson and Company in Warren. 

Of course, with a property like this the real star of the show will always be the Atlantic. Papadopoli’s choice of glass ensures that, even in the depths of winter, the homeowners can track the shifting light and weather, and on warmer days they like to spend much of their time outdoors. “The exterior spaces designed by Todd Richardson are such a part of the whole thing,” says Herrington. 

“If I’m honest,” says Richardson, “we started with such an amazing site that the question was, ‘How do we not blow it?’” The Saco-based landscape architect was relieved to learn that the Herringtons weren’t bothered by a little walking. “So often, you have clients who want to park their car at the front door,” Richardson says. “In this project, you leave the car behind. You can enter in several different ways: there’s a footpath, and then there’s a more formal set of stairs that takes you to the primary entrance.” Using stone quarried from the site and its immediate surroundings and a series of native plantings, Richardson created a terrain that guides visitors gently toward the house. “Subtracting was a big part of what we were doing,” he explains, “at the edges in particular.” They took out a few trees, added a meadow garden (lush with Joe Pye weed, coneflower, and echinacea), and situated the requested hot tub on a ledge next to a moss-covered, truck-size boulder. “A lot of the time, people think of landscape as what you bring to the project,” Richardson says. “But here, the work was in editing the existing landscape and fitting the new elements into the existing space.” Like everyone involved with the build, Richardson wanted to tread lightly and respectfully. The building, as Harrington explained, meant a lot to the local community. It was a landmark, and he was going to be its steward. 

“Our hope with this project was that we could do this one thing, exactly how we wanted to do it,” says Herrington, now that the work has been completed and his family has had time to settle into their space. Although his wife splits her time between Maine and D.C., he was able to move full-time to the peninsula, and even got a part-time job working at the Brooklin Boat Yard, where he says he learns something new every single day. After spending decades dreaming of life in Maine, he couldn’t be happier with the reality. “It was an extraordinary privilege to be able to do this,” he says. “It exceeds all expectations.”