Improve your hand whenever you dream about dwelling inside the Family Stone residence? Us, too. The rich colors, the kitchen desk cluttered with cookbooks and baking duties, 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 similar feeling we obtained after we first observed designer Kacee Witherbee’s private residence 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 primarily in a good way. “I found the house up available on the market all through one among my many drives attempting to get my baby 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 had been sturdy—beautiful flooring, genuine residence home windows, uncommon hallways that we beloved—positive aesthetic particulars had been abandoned over time, and the addition was an actual disaster.” It received right here with three acres of land, a wild orchard, and a barn—and as well as water factors, “a clunky kitchen format with an outdated Vulcan vary sitting smack inside the middle, and peculiar flooring ranges (which we ended up preserving),” Kacee says.
Nonetheless, the professionals merely gained out. “After 20 years in New York, DC, and the Bay House, 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’d take into consideration elevating two little boys. And just because the stimulation and custom of large cities had as quickly as fed us, nature and quiet had been the climate our creative course of wished now.” And with a background in historic preservation, Kacee was correctly outfitted to take it on.
Together with buddies—Jocie Dickson of Jocelyn O. Dickson Construction and Coleman Motley at Woodhull as website supervisor—Kacee modified the harmful ’90s addition with a sweet saltbox she sketched by hand, reusing constructing provides wherever attainable, and crammed the house with antiques, layered textiles, objects collected by means of the years and saved from her childhood home, and the advantageous particulars of family life. Oh, and a really good bar.
Let’s take a look spherical.
Pictures by Ari Kellerman, courtesy of Insides Studio.