Personal, Not Polished: A Designer’s 1800s Cape in Maine (Ready for a Social gathering)

Elevate your hand if you happen to occur to dream about residing inside the Family Stone dwelling? Us, too. The rich colors, the kitchen desk cluttered with cookbooks and baking initiatives, partitions tacked with kids’ drawings and trip taking part in playing cards: It’s a home layered with the life lived in it.

That’s the an identical feeling we acquired after we first seen designer Kacee Witherbee’s private dwelling in Freeport, Maine: an 1800s Cape that Kacee calls “a selective self-portrait: an expression of who we’re as a family, with an appendix of the earlier from which we emerged.”

When Kacee and her husband Sam bought it, though, the house was “a curious mix,” and by no means basically in a good way. “I found the house up available on the market all through one in every of my many drives trying to get my youngster to take a nap,” says Kacee, who’s one half, with Juliana Barton, of Maine-based Insides Studio. “It was an impressively intact Colonial-era Cape paired with a dated and drafty twentieth-century addition. Though the bones have been sturdy—pretty flooring, distinctive dwelling home windows, uncommon hallways that we preferred—positive aesthetic particulars had been abandoned over time, and the addition was an actual disaster.” It acquired right here with three acres of land, a wild orchard, and a barn—and likewise water factors, “a clunky kitchen format with an earlier Vulcan vary sitting smack inside the heart, and weird flooring ranges (which we ended up sustaining),” Kacee says.

Nonetheless, the professionals merely gained out. “After twenty years in New York, DC, and the Bay Area, it felt like a reconnection to the small-town landscapes of our childhoods (Georgia for me, Maine for Sam),” Kacee says. A spot the place we could take into consideration elevating two little boys. And just because the stimulation and custom of huge cities had as quickly as fed us, nature and quiet have been the climate our ingenious course of needed now.” And with a background in historic preservation, Kacee was successfully outfitted to take it on.

Together with mates—Jocie Dickson of Jocelyn O. Dickson Construction and Coleman Motley at Woodhull as web page supervisor—Kacee modified the unhealthy ’90s addition with a sweet saltbox she sketched by hand, reusing constructing provides wherever potential, and crammed the house with antiques, layered textiles, objects collected over time and saved from her childhood dwelling, and the ins and outs of family life. Oh, and a really good bar.

Let’s take a look spherical.

Footage by Ari Kellerman, courtesy of Insides Studio.