Elevate your hand whenever you dream about dwelling throughout the Family Stone house? Us, too. The rich colors, the kitchen desk cluttered with cookbooks and baking initiatives, partitions tacked with children’ drawings and trip enjoying playing cards: It’s a home layered with the life lived in it.

That’s the an identical feeling we purchased as soon as we first seen designer Kacee Witherbee’s private house 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 definitely one among my many drives attempting to get my little one 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 have been sturdy—gorgeous flooring, distinctive house home windows, uncommon hallways that we appreciated—certain aesthetic particulars had been abandoned over time, and the addition was an actual disaster.” It acquired right here with three acres of land, a wild orchard, and a barn—and likewise water factors, “a clunky kitchen construction with an outdated Vulcan vary sitting smack throughout the heart, and peculiar flooring ranges (which we ended up holding),” Kacee says.

Nonetheless, the professionals merely acquired 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 could take into consideration elevating two little boys. And just because the stimulation and custom of giant cities had as quickly as fed us, nature and quiet have been the climate our creative course of wished now.” And with a background in historic preservation, Kacee was successfully outfitted to take it on.

Together with buddies—Jocie Dickson of Jocelyn O. Dickson Construction and Coleman Motley at Woodhull as web site supervisor—Kacee modified the unhealthy ’90s addition with a sweet saltbox she sketched by hand, reusing constructing provides wherever doable, and stuffed the house with antiques, layered textiles, objects collected by the years and saved from her childhood residence, and the superb particulars of family life. Oh, and a really good bar.

Let’s take a look spherical.

Photos by Ari Kellerman, courtesy of Insides Studio.