This SUBtember we’re celebrating BASS BY KEF this September and pairing with some of our most favorite speakers and powered systems. These combinations are great for living rooms, dorm rooms or featured in the home gym, and with the KW-1 Wireless Subwoofer Kit, it’s an even easier install!
Ever since the kids were small, this family of four would set off every summer for two weeks of sailing. Eight hours after departing by boat from Cape Elizabeth, they would arrive at their first stop: Tenants Harbor. Two decades later, when the children were finishing up college and the father was retiring from his job as a commercial pilot, he and his wife found themselves back on the Saint George peninsula. There, they began searching for a spot to build a home where they could age in place, and from which they could sail.
Our experience of a place unfolds through a sequence of moments. We see the light on the water, hear the leaves rustle dryly on the trees, and smell the scent of salt on the air. We approach a place through our senses, and as I pull into the driveway of this classic contemporary Freeport home, designed by architect Gary Lowe of Lowe Associates—Architects in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and built by John Rousseau of Rousseau Builders in Pownal, I enter into a purposefully designed experience, one that was thoughtfully planned to take full advantage of the natural beauty of the Maine coastline.
The land had been in the family for a century, but it still stood empty, save for the tall cedars and sticky pines rising from the spongy carpet of moss that blanketed the ground. “I used to look across the bay from my parents’ house and see these trees,” the homeowner remembers. “I wondered, ‘What’s over there?’ And my dad would say, ‘Someday, that might be where you live.’” At the time, the homeowner says, she couldn’t imagine “living in those scary woods.” There weren’t any houses on that coastal stretch; there wasn’t even a road that ran down from the main byways of Harpswell to this particular piece of land. “But my dad had a dream,” she says. “And now we’re here.”
Technically, the couple at the center of this story first saw their house in Wayne online. After that, they had a more poetic encounter: they paddled by in a kayak and saw not the house— which was hidden by trees like all the homes around Wilson Pond—but loons, ospreys, and an old cabin. Later, after they had bought the property, they heard stories. According to one, a hermit once lived in the cabin without electricity, and people flew food in to him, landing on the ice in winter. According to another, the cabin’s summer residents dressed in a tuxedo and gown to celebrate their anniversary every year. Those who went by on boats saw them out on their dock. For the moment, though, the house-shopping couple were simply drawn to what they could observe from the water.
