Personal, Not Polished: A Designer's 1800s Cape in Maine (Ready for a Party)

Start typing to search...

Raise your hand if you dream about living in the Family Stone house? Us, too. The rich colors, the kitchen table cluttered with cookbooks and baking projects, walls tacked with kids’ drawings and holiday cards: It’s a home layered with the life lived in it.

That’s the same feeling we got when we first saw designer Kacee Witherbee’s own house in Freeport, Maine: an 1800s Cape that Kacee calls “a selective self-portrait: an expression of who we are as a family, with an appendix of the past from which we emerged.”

When Kacee and her husband Sam bought it, though, the house was “a curious mix,” and not necessarily in a good way. “I found the house up for sale during one of my many drives trying to get my baby to take a nap,” says Kacee, who is 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 were strong—beautiful floors, original windows, strange hallways that we loved—certain aesthetic details had been abandoned over time, and the addition was a true disaster.” It came with three acres of land, a wild orchard, and a barn—and also water issues, “a clunky kitchen layout with an old Vulcan stove sitting smack in the middle, and weird floor levels (which we ended up keeping),” Kacee says.

Still, the pros easily won out. “After two decades 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 place where we could imagine raising two little boys. And just as the stimulation and culture of big cities had once fed us, nature and quiet were the elements our creative process needed now.” And with a background in historical preservation, Kacee was well equipped to take it on.

Together with friends—Jocie Dickson of Jocelyn O. Dickson Architecture and Coleman Motley at Woodhull as site manager—Kacee replaced the bad ’90s addition with a sweet saltbox she sketched by hand, reusing construction materials wherever possible, and filled the house with antiques, layered textiles, objects collected over the years and kept from her childhood home, and the bits and bobs of family life. Oh, and a really great bar.

Let’s take a look around.

Photography by Ari Kellerman, courtesy of Insides Studio.

the \1800s cape—with new saltbox addition—is now home to kacee, s 17 — Above: The 1800s Cape—with new saltbox addition—is now home to Kacee, Sam, Hank (age 8), Bo (age 5), and Tilly the dog (age 6 months). In addition to shoring up the house (and fixing the drafts—a no-go in Maine’s seasons), Kacee’s design vision was laid-back: “Nothing too serious, too coordinated, or too polished.” Also: “An atmosphere that can handle the business of life during the day and a sophisticated dinner party at night.”

mulling over what to do about that &#8\2\20;disaster&#8\2\2\1; of a &am 18 — Above: Mulling over what to do about that “disaster” of a ’90s addition, Kacee landed on a New England classic: the saltbox. “Defined by its asymmetrical roof and low profile, this was a clear answer,” she says. “I quickly sketched a modest saltbox covered in shingles. The front was punctuated by small, almost too-tiny windows to offer privacy from the road, while the back opened dramatically with expansive glass windows looking down over the old rambling orchard.” Jocie Dickson transformed the sketch into a set of plans, and the addition now houses a new living area that replaced the old cramped one.

“The living room is my favorite,” Kacee says. “On a snowy day, with the fire going and music on, friends over, and cocktails flowing, it always ends the same way: everyone lying on the rug, feet up on the chairs, in one big, happy heap.” (Note also the soapstone fireplace surround, repurposed from the old kitchen countertops.)