Industrial Chic

03/01/14

Maine Home & Design
By: Debra Spark | Photography: Jamie Salomon

An urban loft tucked inside a New England cottage.

Free verse or formal: this is your choice as a poet. If you are a poet of space, as architects and designers must be, the choice is normally made for you. Working with few restrictions? Wonderful. Working with many, perhaps tricky, rules and requirements? That can be difficult, but sometimes constraints present a pleasing challenge: What can we do with what we have to work with? In 2010 what developer Peter Wellin of Fish House Realty, architect Mark Mueller, builder Michael Monaghan of Monaghan Woodworks, and interior designer Shannon Richards of Custom House Property and Design (all in Portland) had to work with was a stunning property between a cliff and the water’s edge on Danforth Cove in South Portland. The lot was tight and made even tighter by setback requirements (from the ocean and an existing sewer line) and height restrictions that protected a neighbor’s view. Wind added to the complexity: whatever was built would have to withstand the weather off the water. “Mark and I came up with a design that fulfilled our vision for the site,” says Wellin. “But the angles and shape of the home were very much determined by the building envelope that we could fill…….READ MORE.