Testing the Limits
A cliffside house in Harpswell blends into its setting even as it pushes the boundaries of modern Maine design.
When Robert and Marta Frank were ready to build on the steep parcel of land they'd bought overhanging the quiet waters of Quahog Bay in Harpswell, they wanted something traditional - a classic, Shingle-style cottage, maybe. But what they ended up with - a modern, slope-roofed structure that looks like a cross between a ski lodge and a sand shed - was anything but. [For the rest of this story, see the March 2008 issue of Down East.]"It was not what I had in mind," admits Robert, a trial lawyer from Boston, regarding the first time he saw the architect's renderings.
But because the couple knew the architect, Stephen Blatt, of Portland, so well (Marta, a human-services consultant, had grown up with him in Lewiston), they forged ahead with the drawings, working together with their builder for a full year before settling on the final design. The result is clean and quiet, a surprisingly daring configuration of rooms laid out linearly along the edge of the ocean.
"It was like nothing they had ever seen," says Blatt of his modern, Scandinavian-influenced sketches. "There had to be an element of trust to make it work."
The Franks, who also own a condo in Boston, developed that trust years earlier when Blatt redesigned a kitchen in their former home. Coming up with a plan for their Maine property, however, was far more complex. For one, the building site drops down a cliff. Robert and Marta purchased the pine- and rock-studded property fifteen years ago but weren't sure what to do with it. The previous owners had cleared a spot high up near the road. But the couple wanted to be as close to the water as possible - within the legal limits, of course. That meant working the house into the ledgy landscape.
"The first thing we did was completely rethink the site," says Blatt. "We located the house in the trees as close to the water as we could."
That ended up being just one foot beyond the town's seventy-five-foot minimum shoreline setback requirement. In preparing the site, builder Peter Warren, of Peter Warren Construction Group of Topsham, removed as few trees as possible. The attached ninety-five-foot-long pool house was even changed to save one particularly tall pine.
"Basically we cleaned up the site, and that was it," Warren says. "The idea was to make the house look as if it grew there."
Indeed, the house nestles so close to the spiky ledge and scraggly brush that from the road you can see right over the copper-roofed top through the soaring pines to the gray-blue waters beyond. The driveway scoops down to the unadorned front entrance where antique hewn-granite benches are covered with snow. A low overhang, supported by plain columns set along a lengthy stone wall, protects guests from wintery gales. Blatt intended the relatively low roofline to resemble a whale emerging from the sea.
"Our overwhelming theme was to make the house benign," Blatt says. "We wanted to bring it down in scale so it was welcoming."
At a modest 3,500-square-feet, the house is also deliberately unbalanced. Just one room wide, it stretches along the shoreline with carefully sized windows to optimize the view. On the first floor are the guest room, living room, and combined dining room and kitchen as well as Marta's office, two full bathrooms, and a seventy-five-foot-long indoor lap pool. On the second floor, there is only a master suite with a full bath, a dressing room, and Robert's study.
But perhaps even more remarkable than the unusual layout is the abundant use of natural materials - from the rough roofing slates and salvaged mill beams in the pool room, to the fir-sheathed ceiling cresting over the living room. The ceiling, which has recessed lighting, also doubles as a ventilation system, sucking warm air through the spaces between the boards and drawing it into the attic where it is then re-circulated through the house.
The ceiling, one of the most stunning features of the house, was a real challenge. Warren's crew had to bend and clamp the boards in place. Lighting was also difficult. "With a wood ceiling, there is no reflectivity," says Blatt. "It is good for mood, but not good for reading, so we are still trying to tweak the lighting."
There are no bright colors anywhere in the house. The exterior shingles are naturally weathered western red cedar. The interior woodwork is also unpainted, making the heart-pine floors and walls glow when struck by natural light. Blatt deliberately chose the few surfaces that are painted to resemble the gray of the cliff and the green of moss growing beneath the trees.
The Franks, an active couple in their early sixties, hope to retire here someday. So it was important that the house not be overly large but still roomy enough to accommodate two grown daughters and other frequent visitors.
"We tend to have lots of guests, mostly in summer, but a smattering year-round," says Marta. "So we wanted something where we could entertain easily."
The living room, the largest room in the house, is connected to the dining room and kitchen by two wide stairways, one on either side of an immense double-sided bluestone fireplace. Combining the dining area and kitchen into one room allows a number of people to use the space simultaneously, whether they're prepping dinner on the Maine slate counter tops, pouring drinks at the mahogany bar, or reposing near the crackling hearth at the Thos. Moser table.
The frameless, modern European cabinets, which are Douglas fir, are the handiwork of Joe Pollak, of Knock on Woodworks in Westbrook. "The minimalist style is very challenging because the grain of the wood follows through from door to door," says Pollak. "You can't make a mistake or you have to change all of it."
Wide windows span the full length of the kitchen, which overlooks the ice floes clacking along the channel, dense forests blanketed by snow, and a white antique farmhouse with a red roof on the far side of the water.
"We have no desire to hang anything," Marta says of the walls, which remain bare throughout the main rooms of the house.
"The art is right outside the window," adds Robert, who faces his desk away from his office windows in order to complete more work.
A screened summer porch with bluestone tiles directly off the kitchen allows the Franks to enjoy the outdoors as much as possible. A back hall leads to Marta's office, which has a cork floor and tall windows with views of the trees and water. The hall also adjoins a secondary entrance, at the far end of the covered walkway outside, with plenty of closet room for coats and a rolling bench for winter boots.
Beyond the hall is the narrow pool room, which is enclosed in winter and open in summer. The room has lower air pressure than the rest of the house to keep humidity from seeping out. To reduce energy costs, the pool also has a retractable cover. A series of small, staggered windows face the ledge, while sliding patio doors face the water. A large window at the far end of the pool keeps the room from feeling too closed in. An adjoining full bathroom with plenty of cabinet space for storing clothes has double doors leading back into the main house.
"The kitchen is for me, the pool is for him," Marta says, pointing to Robert. "He'll swim for two-and-a-half hours at a time. I have to call him out."
A wood-paneled staircase with a mahogany rail rises to the second floor and the Franks' master bedroom. Here, as in the rest of the house, the furniture is intentionally subdued. A simple platform bed rests against one wall. A narrow side table and a rocking chair are the only other pieces of furniture in the room, which has corner windows facing the trees and water.
"If we've made a contribution to the house, it is that we haven't filled it up with clutter," Robert says.
In addition to the downstairs guest room, which has its own bathroom and a screened porch, the Franks have a separate two-bedroom guest cottage next door. The house also has a flat-roofed, three-car garage. Landscaping is minimal, with low bush blueberries planted along the front entrance of the house. Granite foundation stones salvaged from a Maine farm create terracing toward the water. But in winter, all is white and gray, with spindly shoots poking through the snow.
In spite of its progressive design, the house maintains a Maine sensibility with its paired-down aesthetic and unpretentious faA§ade. Blatt says he knew he had achieved his intention when he was helping a friend bring a yacht up from Connecticut. Blatt pointed to the house from the water as they sailed past.
"Where?" his friend asked.
"There." Blatt pointed.
"Where?"
He couldn't see it.
"To me," Blatt says, "That is quite wonderful."
The Franks agree.
But because the couple knew the architect, Stephen Blatt, of Portland, so well (Marta, a human-services consultant, had grown up with him in Lewiston), they forged ahead with the drawings, working together with their builder for a full year before settling on the final design. The result is clean and quiet, a surprisingly daring configuration of rooms laid out linearly along the edge of the ocean.
"It was like nothing they had ever seen," says Blatt of his modern, Scandinavian-influenced sketches. "There had to be an element of trust to make it work."
The Franks, who also own a condo in Boston, developed that trust years earlier when Blatt redesigned a kitchen in their former home. Coming up with a plan for their Maine property, however, was far more complex. For one, the building site drops down a cliff. Robert and Marta purchased the pine- and rock-studded property fifteen years ago but weren't sure what to do with it. The previous owners had cleared a spot high up near the road. But the couple wanted to be as close to the water as possible - within the legal limits, of course. That meant working the house into the ledgy landscape.
"The first thing we did was completely rethink the site," says Blatt. "We located the house in the trees as close to the water as we could."
That ended up being just one foot beyond the town's seventy-five-foot minimum shoreline setback requirement. In preparing the site, builder Peter Warren, of Peter Warren Construction Group of Topsham, removed as few trees as possible. The attached ninety-five-foot-long pool house was even changed to save one particularly tall pine.
"Basically we cleaned up the site, and that was it," Warren says. "The idea was to make the house look as if it grew there."
Indeed, the house nestles so close to the spiky ledge and scraggly brush that from the road you can see right over the copper-roofed top through the soaring pines to the gray-blue waters beyond. The driveway scoops down to the unadorned front entrance where antique hewn-granite benches are covered with snow. A low overhang, supported by plain columns set along a lengthy stone wall, protects guests from wintery gales. Blatt intended the relatively low roofline to resemble a whale emerging from the sea.
"Our overwhelming theme was to make the house benign," Blatt says. "We wanted to bring it down in scale so it was welcoming."
At a modest 3,500-square-feet, the house is also deliberately unbalanced. Just one room wide, it stretches along the shoreline with carefully sized windows to optimize the view. On the first floor are the guest room, living room, and combined dining room and kitchen as well as Marta's office, two full bathrooms, and a seventy-five-foot-long indoor lap pool. On the second floor, there is only a master suite with a full bath, a dressing room, and Robert's study.
But perhaps even more remarkable than the unusual layout is the abundant use of natural materials - from the rough roofing slates and salvaged mill beams in the pool room, to the fir-sheathed ceiling cresting over the living room. The ceiling, which has recessed lighting, also doubles as a ventilation system, sucking warm air through the spaces between the boards and drawing it into the attic where it is then re-circulated through the house.
The ceiling, one of the most stunning features of the house, was a real challenge. Warren's crew had to bend and clamp the boards in place. Lighting was also difficult. "With a wood ceiling, there is no reflectivity," says Blatt. "It is good for mood, but not good for reading, so we are still trying to tweak the lighting."
There are no bright colors anywhere in the house. The exterior shingles are naturally weathered western red cedar. The interior woodwork is also unpainted, making the heart-pine floors and walls glow when struck by natural light. Blatt deliberately chose the few surfaces that are painted to resemble the gray of the cliff and the green of moss growing beneath the trees.
The Franks, an active couple in their early sixties, hope to retire here someday. So it was important that the house not be overly large but still roomy enough to accommodate two grown daughters and other frequent visitors.
"We tend to have lots of guests, mostly in summer, but a smattering year-round," says Marta. "So we wanted something where we could entertain easily."
The living room, the largest room in the house, is connected to the dining room and kitchen by two wide stairways, one on either side of an immense double-sided bluestone fireplace. Combining the dining area and kitchen into one room allows a number of people to use the space simultaneously, whether they're prepping dinner on the Maine slate counter tops, pouring drinks at the mahogany bar, or reposing near the crackling hearth at the Thos. Moser table.
The frameless, modern European cabinets, which are Douglas fir, are the handiwork of Joe Pollak, of Knock on Woodworks in Westbrook. "The minimalist style is very challenging because the grain of the wood follows through from door to door," says Pollak. "You can't make a mistake or you have to change all of it."
Wide windows span the full length of the kitchen, which overlooks the ice floes clacking along the channel, dense forests blanketed by snow, and a white antique farmhouse with a red roof on the far side of the water.
"We have no desire to hang anything," Marta says of the walls, which remain bare throughout the main rooms of the house.
"The art is right outside the window," adds Robert, who faces his desk away from his office windows in order to complete more work.
A screened summer porch with bluestone tiles directly off the kitchen allows the Franks to enjoy the outdoors as much as possible. A back hall leads to Marta's office, which has a cork floor and tall windows with views of the trees and water. The hall also adjoins a secondary entrance, at the far end of the covered walkway outside, with plenty of closet room for coats and a rolling bench for winter boots.
Beyond the hall is the narrow pool room, which is enclosed in winter and open in summer. The room has lower air pressure than the rest of the house to keep humidity from seeping out. To reduce energy costs, the pool also has a retractable cover. A series of small, staggered windows face the ledge, while sliding patio doors face the water. A large window at the far end of the pool keeps the room from feeling too closed in. An adjoining full bathroom with plenty of cabinet space for storing clothes has double doors leading back into the main house.
"The kitchen is for me, the pool is for him," Marta says, pointing to Robert. "He'll swim for two-and-a-half hours at a time. I have to call him out."
A wood-paneled staircase with a mahogany rail rises to the second floor and the Franks' master bedroom. Here, as in the rest of the house, the furniture is intentionally subdued. A simple platform bed rests against one wall. A narrow side table and a rocking chair are the only other pieces of furniture in the room, which has corner windows facing the trees and water.
"If we've made a contribution to the house, it is that we haven't filled it up with clutter," Robert says.
In addition to the downstairs guest room, which has its own bathroom and a screened porch, the Franks have a separate two-bedroom guest cottage next door. The house also has a flat-roofed, three-car garage. Landscaping is minimal, with low bush blueberries planted along the front entrance of the house. Granite foundation stones salvaged from a Maine farm create terracing toward the water. But in winter, all is white and gray, with spindly shoots poking through the snow.
In spite of its progressive design, the house maintains a Maine sensibility with its paired-down aesthetic and unpretentious faA§ade. Blatt says he knew he had achieved his intention when he was helping a friend bring a yacht up from Connecticut. Blatt pointed to the house from the water as they sailed past.
"Where?" his friend asked.
"There." Blatt pointed.
"Where?"
He couldn't see it.
"To me," Blatt says, "That is quite wonderful."
The Franks agree.
- By: Meadow Rue Merrill
