Back around Labor Day a couple of years ago, we first spotted the Soot House on Instagram: a tiny, charred-black house hand-built by a sculptor turned DIY builder, surrounded by scrubby pines and low-bush blueberries on the island of Spruce Head in Maine. Since then we’ve toured the small but hyper-efficient house (see Conjuring the Ghosts of Old New England on Spruce Head in Maine) and returned to it again and again as a pioneering example of Maine resourcefulness and artfulness in one.
Today, in honor of our Maine issue, we’re taking a closer look at the house’s deconstructed kitchen, reminiscent of the old New England root cellar. Join us.
Above: The house, where builder Anthony Esteves and designer Julie O’Rourke live with their young son, Diogo. It’s earned the name the Soot House, for the Japanese-style fermented soot paint Esteves used on the exterior of the small annex. (For more on the exterior, see Curb Appeal: A Classic New England Color Palette on Spruce Head in Maine.) Above: Inside, the house is small but economical with space. Above: The high-ceilinged living room and dining room give way to a sunken, low-ceilinged kitchen. Esteves designed the layout with maximum efficiency in mind, particularly for the long Maine winters: Heat from the woodstove in the kitchen—the house’s only heat source—rises through the ceiling into the sleeping loft above, then is pulled back downward through a floor grate to create a convection heating system for the whole house. Above: The kitchen, with the woodstove in question, a concrete floor, and half-wall, and a deep sink and cabinet at right. Esteves made the molds and poured the concrete for the sink himself.
Above L: Herbs at the ready in a wooden bowl. Above R: Stacked firewood for the woodstove. Esteves says that, because of the efficiency of design, the family only goes through half a cord of wood a year: “roughly $150,” he says. Above: A concrete ledge provides a place for display. Above: Esteves’s hand-built cedar shelves serve as both storage and room divider. Above: Another moment of economy: Unused space beneath the main-level floor is used to store dry goods (plus out-of-season clothes and bedding, out of sight). Above: Opposite the woodstove: a deconstructed cook space, with a small cooktop atop a vintage hutch. Above: The top of the small set of stairs that leads down into the kitchen. Above: The Smeg refrigerator is kept out of the kitchen, in a niche clad with cedar boards and hooks from Sugar Tools in Camden. (See Shopper’s Diary: Sugar Tools in Camden, Maine.) Above: The family outside their Soot House.
We like these kitchens in Maine that draw from old New England, with pragmatism and artfulness in the mix:
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