Does Maine have a special appeal for writers?
When the couple who own this Bar Harbor home share their address, people sometimes say, “Oh, I’ve slept there.” When they first consulted a local architect about renovating, the architect wasn’t inclined to help. He thought the house was fine as it was.
For orthodontist Jeanne McDonald, architecture is a lot like dentistry. “It’s artistic but a little mechanical,” she says.
One day in 1999, Madelon and Gene LeBlanc called their son Michael with news. They had been in Bridgton, Maine, for the weekend and bought three acres of land with the intention of building a retirement home there.
Fred and Donna Trudo have skied all over the world. They have hit major slopes in Switzerland, France, Spain, Austria, Andorra, and South America. But it was on a trip in Montana—to Moonlight Basin near Big Sky—that they saw a ski house that gave them the inspiration to pursue their own dream home.
To get to their summer home, Connie and Arthur Batson of Falmouth pack up the car and drive all of 36 miles to Kennebunk. It might seem strange to vacation so near one’s
winter home, but for sixty years the Batsons have been summering at Kennebunk Beach.
To get to their summer home, Connie and Arthur Batson of Falmouth pack up the car and drive all of 36 miles to Kennebunk. It might seem strange to vacation so near one’s
winter home, but for sixty years the Batsons have been summering at Kennebunk Beach.
If you are, in large part, responsible for your village’s economy, you might well expect to have the grandest house around. Limestone baron H. L. Shepherd did.
For several years now, Ted Andrews of Harborside Design in Freeport and Christine Maclin of Maclin Design in Portland have been collaborating on the incremental renovation of a house near the tip of Bailey Island. Can you badmouth a house? The Bailey Island home had at least one surprising detractor: the current homeowner, who wasn’t particularly fond of the house when she and her husband bought it.
Stone Gables is the name of an English Tudor-style home perched on a granite ledge in Cape Elizabeth. As perhaps befits a windswept, ocean-side property with such a name, the house has a bit of the feel of the manor and comes complete with, if not a sweeping saga, an interesting history.
Ken Schiano remembers Mary Ann Carey first approaching QA13 Architects, the Bangor firm that he and his wife Paula Beall run, with a peculiar request.
How green can you go?
The fast-talking, gravelly voiced art broker might have, on any given day, a Sir Joshua Reynolds painting in the foyer of his home while a duffel bag packed with a black-and-gold bikini and knee-high boots waits upstairs for his next match.
Linda Greenlaw isn't exactly the sort of person you'd expect to write a cookbook.
... a last-chance-this-year picnic on an island just off the coast.
Christel didn't think she'd ordered fried chicken and biscuits, but that's what the waiter brought.
The difference between restaurants that fail and those that succeed are the ones that fail close.
The chef's culinary roots are ... well, honey-glazed doughnuts.
Thomas Mann’s directive in “The Magic Mountain” couldn’t be clearer: The heady pleasures of the high mountains are all well and good, but sooner or later, you have to descend to the flat lands and begin your real life.
My first day in Saratoga Springs was characteristically grand: I was led up the stairs of a 55-room mansion and told to make myself at home in a tower studio, complete with a prayer closet and bust of the Madonna.
Nothing gives you the No Chair in the Great Musical Chairs Game of Life quite like being a Jew on Christmas Day.
When I drive from my home in mid-Maine to the coast, I pass a dilapidated chicken barn that never fails to affect me.
For a comprehensive list of Debra Spark’s journalism publications, please see her curriculum vitae.
Site designed and illustrated by North40Creative