Building on Past Success

This house first took shape along Maine’s pastoral southern coast back in 1767. For heavens sake, Benjamin Franklin was alive! If we watched a movie of its construction, we’d see a big ox pulling timbers, neighbors convening to help and a feast—heavy on pies—staged under leafy trees.

Travel through centuries to the 1930s. The Chrysler Building is dazzling New Yorkers; readers everywhere are mad for Gone With the Wind. Up in northern New England, the little house has endured. Countless sunrises, seasons and storms—both natural and man-made—have come and gone. An architect and his family now make the house their home.

Using his skills, the architect moves the structure, sliding it down the lane to a better site, then enlarges it. Along with more space, the house gains polish: a gracious front entry, arched doorways and sweet window seats that invite reverie. Of course, the ancient hand-hewn beams are maintained as a tribute to earlier days.

More years pass, a fresh millennium begins and suddenly it’s 2009. That same architect’s grandson, with grown children of his own, occupies the house now. Like his grandfather before him, he recognizes the need to modernize. So he recruits architect Lisa DeStefano to guide the house forward once more. DeStefano’s passion for history and provenance makes her the ideal choice. “A renovation, especially one with an addition, is always a challenge,” explains the Portsmouth, New Hampshire–based architect. “You need to fulfill your client’s wishes. But you also need to transform the house in a way that will leave it still looking at home in its landscape. A success is when people can’t tell the old part from the new.”

ARCHITECTURE
Lisa DeStefano
CONSTRUCTION
Maine Coast Builders
STYLED BY
Stacy Kunstel