“When I was growing up, we went to a little log cabin in Maine,” says a musician now based in Colorado. “It sounds romantic, but it really was three boys stuck in a one-room cabin with a loft. Maine can be rainy, foggy, and dreary. We’d go a little stir crazy.” Like many childhood summers, his was a mix of boredom and adventure. Part of the romance was his family’s deep roots in the isolated area of Englishman Bay, a two-hour drive east of the bustling seaside community of Bar Harbor. His father had been born in the cabin, and relatives had been summering in the region since the 1880s. And, on sunny days, Maine was fun. He and his brothers played in the woods and clambered over the rocks by the ocean. All the same, he and his brothers were ready to go home at summer’s end.

Now he, his wife, and their two daughters still visit Englishman Bay, but their vacation home is decidedly more stylish. In late 2015, they asked Whitten Architects and Nate Holyoke Builders (in Portland and Holden, respectively) for a durable, minimalist home, simultaneously rustic and Scandinavian, that would sit lightly on the land and make use of local materials whenever possible. (They knew Whitten and Holyoke’s work because the team had built a nearby Norwegian-inspired home for the musician’s cousin.) Principal architect Russ Tyson translated the family’s request into a striking, partially transparent house with simple geometries. The U-shaped dwelling comprises three primary forms: a three-story entry tower with a roof deck, a rectangular bedroom wing, and a dramatic, three-season glassed-in porch—organized around a double-sided concrete chimney—that serves as a great room.

The entry tower is the most complex of the volumes, as it includes a raised, ground-floor entrance hall, a second-floor powder room with a glass bridge that leads to the kitchen, a third-floor office, and a rooftop observation deck. The bedroom wing consists of a master and two children’s bedrooms off a single hallway with a horizontal ribbon of windows. The three-season porch and adjacent kitchen link the bedroom wing and tower.

Clad in relatively rot-resistant local hemlock and making use of Douglas fir for the porch framing, the house is raised up on steel columns. The height maximizes water views and allows one to venture under the house. Horizontal steel beams support the undercarriage of the home, and board-formed concrete appears under each section—at the entry stairs (where the concrete also hides the mechanicals), at the base of the porch chimney, and around the bedroom wing’s plumbing.

The homeowners asked for balconies to be cantilevered toward the water to suggest the prow of a boat and for a roof hatch at the top of the staircase leading to the rooftop deck. “It should feel like climbing out of an old wooden ship to the top deck,” the husband told the architects.

As built, the house is brushed by surrounding foliage. The interior ceilings and walls are mostly Eastern white pine, the floor is a gray-stained Southern yellow pine, and the flat-panel kitchen cabinets and island are Baltic birch plywood. Given all this, the operating metaphor for the house as a whole is actually less ship than tree house. Principal architect Russ Tyson recalled The Swiss Family Robinson when he first heard the clients’ hopes for the home, all the more so when he later realized that animals—specifically, the family’s three voluble parrots—were “a surprisingly big part of the program,” as Tyson puts it. To accommodate the birds’ flight, the porch’s sloped ceiling rises to 11 feet at its highest point. Meanwhile, horizontal surfaces were largely eliminated to prevent the birds from perching where they were not wanted.

Interior designer Krista Stokes took her cues from the architecture and furnished sparsely, using a neutral palette with occasional jewel tones (as for the bed linens). She sourced modern furniture from Design Within Reach and added signature contemporary pieces like a steel chair covered in sheepskin for the living room. “I learned so much about restraint from the clients,” says Stokes. “Everyone has a basket on my desk. For these clients, I had a postcard with a quote from Thoreau on their basket that read, ‘My greatest skill has been to want but little.’”

Project architect Tom Lane thinks not of a metaphor but of architectural history when he describes the house, which quite consciously references Le Corbusier’s famed Villa Savoye, itself an exemplar of the “five points” of Le Corbusier’s architecture manifesto: supporting columns, a free internal plan, a free facade, a roof garden, and horizontal windows, all of which the Englishman Bay house has, although its roof is for star-gazing rather than vegetation. Paths cut around but also below the house, where Atlantic Landscaping placed round river stones, as well as moss, ferns, lowbush blueberry, and other native plants.

Now, even when the weather doesn’t cooperate, vacations are fun. “There are numerous little nooks for reading, and everyone has their own bedroom to retreat to if they wish,” says the musician. “Whether playing guitar, doing puzzles, playing imaginary games, or just watching the ocean crash on the rocks outside through the many bright windows, the whole family has plenty of space.”

Project Credits:

Architect: Whitten Architects / @whittenarchitects

Builder: Nate Holyoke Builders

Structural Engineer: Albert Putnam Associates

Landscape Design: Atlantic Landscape Construction

Lighting Design: Whitten Architects

Interior Design: Krista Stokes

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