Decor Maine, Issue No. 06

A home on the southern coast pushes the limits of scale.

There’s a line somewhere about “best-laid plans” that is apt for this Kennebunkport titan. What started as an 8000 squarefoot design grew to over 14,000 squarefoot by the time construction wrapped. “A lot was added along the way,” says builder Kevin Lord. These additions included a golf simulator, a wine cellar, theater, and butler’s quarters—to name a few. “These ended up fifilling the basement, which meant we needed room for the mechanicals, the components that actually run the home,” Kevin says. “We ended up adding a lot of structure to the living space below ground, under the patios, under the stairs. We couldn’t make the home any larger, but anywhere there was existing coverage, we were allowed to build below. A lot of the home we extended sub-grade.”

Maine Home+Design, July 2021

A retreat for a New York couple in Kennebunkport is all about flow and relaxing with family and friends.

When asked what drew them to the Pine Tree State, Ken and Amy Ross credit their son as the primary influence. “Clint turned our New Yorker family into lovers of Maine,” says Ken, a longtime CBS executive and television producer whose credits include Space Jam. Amy, who spent years in public relations for the entertainment industry but is now a professional chef, explains that their son, now 27 and about to be married, spent time at Chewonki, the camp and environmental education organization based in Wiscasset, and later attended Colby College in Waterville. “We always told him we’d follow him wherever he went,” she says.

Decor Maine, December 2020

The owners of this Kennebunk Beach house had vacation in mind when they commissioned their summer home, but that didn’t mean they wanted (or could) unplug entirely. “One owner needed a space where he could work while they were enjoying summers in Maine,” says builder Kevin Lord. “The ofice became a very important part of the project.”

Decor Maine, September 2020

A couple transform an 1800s captain’s house, smack-dab in the center of Cape Porpoise village.

When one’s home base is a 100-acre farm north of Toronto—a place where, until recently, couples got married in the rolling fields and toasted their new life in the renovated barn—the Maine harbor town of Cape Porpoise, nine hours south, almost feels bustling in comparison.

Maine Home+Design, August 2018

Salvaged materials and careful choices fill a new home with warmth and permanence.

There aren’t many locations in Maine—or anywhere— that can rival a particular narrow spit on the southern coast, bounded on either side by dark ledges of water-worn rocks and bright tangles of beach roses. The wide-open sea stretches away on one side, while the other looks back over a small cove and sandy beach. Near the end of this spit is a small parcel of land that for many years held an old cottage and garage. When the homeowners decided to rebuild, they were committed to honoring the special character of the spot with a home that welcomes guests and family with a sense of place and history.

Maine Home+Design, April 2018

For custom homebuilder Kevin Lord, success happens the old-fashioned way.

In direct contrast to the stunning, richly detailed homes he builds along the southern Maine coastline, Kevin Lord’s office building on Route 1 in Arundel is an unassuming box. On the approach, the only key to its identity is a parked truck lettered with his company’s name, Thomas and Lord. Inside, among the cabinet door and moulding samples, a framed quote attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt offers a key to Lord himself: “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” Lord is more of a powerboat guy, but the words still aptly describe his path to success: he has ridden out the rough waves with hard work, tenacity, and a fearless ability to take risks.

Maine Home+Design, August 2017

A Kennebunk shingle style for twenty-first-century grandparents.

John and Mary Mills seem as much comedy team as retirees as they talk about their new home in Kennebunk. The story starts with a run. “In the summertime, I am a jogger, not a runner,” John says. “I slog along.” On one such jaunt, on a lovely late August day three years ago, John decided to go farther than usual and run down Parsons Beach Road. If the lane had “No Trespassing” signs, he missed them. He ran past a horse farm and on to an “unbelievably beautiful” stretch of oceanfront with wide views up and down the coast. Oddly, when he returned from what had become an eight-mile run, he found a postcard in his mailbox advertising the very acreage that had so wowed him.

Maine Home+Design, May 2017

Nantucket quaintness meets contemporary chic in Cape Porpoise.

Miami-based Tim Harrington is an active developer responsible for multiple luxury hotels, restaurants, a gym/health center, and other properties, new and developing, in the Kennebunks and Biddeford. He’s been busy on the home front, too, having renovated eight houses in the 29 years that he’s lived off and on in the Kennebunks. In 2013, when I visited the 1880s post-and-beam he’d renovated on the mouth of the Kennebunk River, he told me he was done, at least when it came to his own abodes. The post-and-beam was the house that he loved, the house he was going to stay in.

Maine Home+Design, May 2016

Formal meets functional in a Kennebunkport home designed for graciously entertaining family and friends.

Rust Hills, the late fiction editor of Esquire, used to say that the first line of a short story should introduce the themes of the work to come. The same might be said of a home’s front door: it should invite you in, while establishing the nature of what is inside. Perhaps this is more ideal than realistic, but it is an ideal achieved in a couple’s 2013 Kennebunkport home.

Maine Home+Design, October 2015

A couple balances their sunny Miami Beach life with a swanky, stylish colonial in Cape Porpoise.

One day, a developer friend called Steve Oraham and Jim Samson at their Miami Beach home to say he’d found a “great house in Cape Porpoise and you’re really dumb if you don’t buy it”—a bit of exhortation that was a joke (in its putdown) but earnest enough. “He was probably sick of us staying in his house,” Samson opines. More joking. But the truth was he and Oraham had been coming to the Kennebunks for 20 years, so owning there made a certain sense.

Maine Home+Design, May 2014

A new home anchors Kennebunk’s Gooch’s Beach while referencing the past and anticipating the future.

Since 1660, there has been an inn on one end of Gooch’s Beach in Kennebunk. Since 1756, that establishment has been the Seaside Inn, run by the Gooch family and their descendants. In fact, the current owners are ninth-generation innkeepers, which makes the Seaside Inn the oldest continuously operating family business in the country. In 1959, a ranch house called The Dunes was built next to the inn and by 2001—when a Wisconsin bond manager, his wife, and two children were visiting the Kennebunks—the house was available for rental. The family rented each August till 2009, when the Seaside Inn’s 20 acres were subdivided, and the house came up for sale. “We love that beach. We love that community,” the husband says. “We had to buy it or say goodbye.”

Maine Home+Design, February 2014

A private home for a hotel person.

Real estate developer and hotelier Tim Harrington is responsible, with his business partners, for nine upscale hotels and inns in the Kennebunk area. Their properties include luxury bungalows in the woods; bright, chic rooms at Goose Rocks Beach; a New England inn; and elegant, European-style accommodations: Hidden Pond, the Tides Beach Club, the Kennebunkport Inn, and the Grand Hotel respectively. So where does the Miami-based Harrington rest his weary head when he is in town? The answer has changed in the 29 years that Harrington has been coming to the Kennebunks.

Maine Home+Design, August 2013

A 1950s ranch renovated for art and stress-free living.

What movies do actors watch, what books do writers read, what clothes do fashion designers wear? I always want the inside scoop. So when I was offered a chance to visit Kevin Thomas’s house, I jumped at it. Thomas is the publisher of Maine Home+Design (as well as Maine magazine), and from 2003 to 2010 he built high-end custom houses under the auspices of what is now Thomas and Lord in Kennebunkport. Since Thomas has built many beautiful houses and seen even more, I wondered what he might want for his own home, given his clear sense of the possibilities.

Maine Home+Design, May 2012

Something is happening in the Kennebunks. People are moving here. Building here. Opening businesses here. Tim Harrington is not surprised. These small towns have always had big heart.

At some point during the planning of my wedding, about the time when dresses and hairstyles and such were being discussed, I balked. All this to-do. It wasn’t my thing. I said to my mother, “I don’t really want to be the focus of attention.”

“But you’re the bride,” she observed.

Well, true enough.

Maine Home+Design, May 2012

Two city dwellers build their dream home in Lower Village.

City dwellers are an adaptable bunch. Fueled by the hustle and bustle, they aren’t deterred by a little background noise, and somewhere along the way have made peace with the fact that their personal space is, well, shared. And while most of Maine offers quite a different experience, there are places here where city lovers feel more at home.

Maine Home+Design, July 2011

How does a young builder from away break into the well-established, tight-knit local building community? Kevin Lord will tell you.

Growing up in Chicopee, Massachusetts, Kevin Lord was always lucky. In fact, he earned a reputation for it. On every high school snow day, he and his friends met up to play nickel poker—with predictable results. “Whenever there was money involved, I always won,” Lord says today, as if he still can’t believe it himself. “My friends would razz me. But I won every card game we had and every raffle I entered.”

Maine Home+Design, May 2008

It was a storm of epic proportions. For three tidal cycles, the waves pounded Gooch’s Beach in Kennebunk, breaching and eventually destroying the seawall, lifting boulders onto the road and into the yards of the houses along Beach Avenue. Homes were flooded, roads were impassible, seaweed and beach detritus littered lawns and porches. Now known as the Patriot’s Day storm, it was a Nor’easter that drove up the eastern seaboard in April 2007 and hit the Maine coast with a terrifying ferocity not seen since 1991. In the aftermath, residents struggled to deal with extensive damage from waves, wind, and rain.