The Portland Symphony Orchestra's 12th Annual ShowHouse
REMARKABLE - NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2007
By Joshua Bodwell
Photography Darren Setlow
Entryway
Olivia Atherton
Olivia Atherton Decorative Painting and Design
Grand Foyer
Linda Banks and James Light
Simply Home
In 1927, America was roaring. The country was riding a blissful wave of pre-Depression innocence. The 1920s were an era of extravagance and good times, and 1927 in particular was a year of great highs and many firsts.
Charles Lindbergh’s solo, non-stop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris captivated Americans early in the year. Then, at the close of the 1927 baseball season, the country was dazzled when Babe Ruth hit a record-breaking 60 home runs. And as the Ford Motor Company transitioned from the iconic Model T to the new Model A, the nation saw its monumental tribute to past presidents, Mount Rushmore, begin to take shape.
In Maine that summer, renowned American artist Edward Hopper was working on his famous painting of Two Lights in Cape Elizabeth. And in Falmouth, on a four-acre parcel nestled against Mussel Cove, the 6,000-square-foot Oakley Estate was nearing completion.
The Oakley family had their 14-room, six-bath estate designed with classic Tudor characteristics. An enormously popular style during the 1920s and 1930s, Tudor homes mimicked the humble look of medieval European cottages with exposed decorative timbers, narrow windows, and steeply pitched roofs. While the Oakley Estate has the shape and proportions of a Tudor, its brick façade, slate roof, and copper gutters elevate it to a higher level of sophistication.
Although the estate has changed hands several times over the decades, and has undergone the occasional upgrade, soon after Falmouth residents Stephen and Kimberly Goodrich purchased the home in April of this year, they quickly realized that the kitchen needed immediate attention.
“I came over in mid-April to discuss remodeling the kitchen,” remembers custom builder Dale Bragg of Yarmouth. “And then Stephen and I started looking around…”
By early May, an extensive rehab was well underway. “It seemed like every day we’d find a new problem,” says Bragg. “The windows and doors all needed to be replaced, the brick façade needed to be re-pointed, the roof was leaking, and the copper gutters were in horrible shape.” It was around this time—when every corner seemed to reveal some new problem—that Stephen Goodrich told Bragg he wanted to have the house ready by September so that it could be featured as the 12th Portland Symphony Orchestra Designers’ ShowHouse. “Soon after we purchased the house,” says Goodrich, “I became aware that the PSO was interested in it as a potential location for their ShowHouse. I thought supporting the symphony would be a positive thing to be a part of.” Bragg, in his characteristically easy-going manner, took the announcement in stride.
Fourteen designers from around New England would be tackling some component of the estate, and to keep all of them coordinated and on-schedule with hundreds of workers, the PSO brought on Dale Akeley of Project Resources in Yarmouth to be the project manager. With the two-Dale team—Akeley and Bragg —working side by side, the ShowHouse came together as seamlessly as a project of its magnitude and ambition could ever hope to. Given the tight timeline, major renovations were completed at a breakneck pace: a whole new slate roof was laid, an enormous and obsolete chimney was torn down, an upstairs hallway was widened, a steel support beam was added to open up the kitchen, an upstairs bedroom became the master bathroom, and…the list goes on and on. Throughout this chaos of destruction and reconstruction, designers still managed to refurbish their rooms. Miraculously, roughly four months later—and in probably half the time that a project of this size would have normally taken—the house was ready to be unveiled.
In many cases, showhouses are creatively and aesthetically disjointed. Many of them look and feel as though a dozen independently minded artists were let loose to paint upon a single canvas. At the Oakley Estate, however, the unusually high level of homeowner involvement led to a thoughtfully executed, refreshingly cohesive, and thoroughly exciting project.
Over the following pages, the most we’ve ever committed to a single project, Maine HOME+DESIGN chronicles the stunning results of those four feverish months of hard work and inspired design.
Entryway
While some people might have been intimidated by the idea of designing an entryway—the very first room guests will see upon arrival—Olivia Atherton of Newcastle tempered any anxiety she may have felt with one comforting thought: at least it’s small. “I understand the importance of the space,” says Atherton, “but for me it’s always about creating a design that fits the room’s size and scale.”
Casting off the possible confines of the home’s Tudor-style vintage, Atherton aimed for “elegant but not stuffy.” As skilled a painter as she is a decorator, Atherton hand painted the entryway’s luminous walls herself. Atop three layers of “background” colors—“It’s all about what’s underneath,” Atherton says with a glint in her eye—she added an additional four layers of color to the floral pattern, which she created from a mix of freehand work and hand-cut stencils.
The entryway’s overall tone—with its soft walls, terracotta tiles, iron-framed table with roughhewn-wood top, and assorted accents from the Cottage Garden Center in Damariscotta—provides a gentle, garden-influenced transition into the house. Atherton’s hints of red and gold also give the space an oriental undercurrent. “Red and gold can go either way: tacky or sumptuous,” she laughs. “I hope I got the latter!”
Grand Foyer
A home’s foyer can suffer just as much from too much attention as it can from too little. “Learning to edit is crucial,” says Simply Home’s senior designer James Light of good interior design. Light, together with Simply Home proprietor Linda Banks, worked to design an understated foyer that is the embodiment of elegance.
The browns and pinks in a linen pillow that the homeowner adored were the initial inspiration for Simply Home’s approach. “We always like to have a ‘driver,’” says Banks. Then came the question of theme. “We immediately eschewed the notion of nautical,” says Banks. “Instead, we wanted to honor the theme of an English Garden.” Light is quick to add: “Our design references the garden,” he says, “but it’s not the potting shed.”
Indeed, it is certainly not. The foyer is, in the designer’s words, “simple and appropriate.” The drama and elegance of the room are achieved through tasteful design and subtle detail. “Foyers are transitional spaces,” Light says, “and they need to be both quiet and inviting, so we looked at what this house is and where it is, and we respected that.”
The team’s sensitive garden theme led them to natural colors such as sage green, rose, and cocoa brown. A softly-textured Georgian Rope Trellis wallpaper was paired with a warm biscotti-colored carpet. Several large, hand-colored Italian garden plans were placed along the walls of the winding staircase. At the top of the stairs, the team hung a convex, Banks-designed butterfly mirror with a gold-leaf frame and, above the stairs, a round, wrought-iron armillary sphere chandelier brings in even more Old World charm. “We saw designing this foyer as an opportunity to return a part of the home to its original stature,” says Banks.
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