Sorrento Cabin
2017-2022
1800 sqft

We were offered the opportunity to design and build a house for friends in Northern Maine. The site had previously been the location of a writing cabin built in the early 1900s for their great-grandfather and is still bordered by family homes. Working with the owners, we developed a series of designs that would retain elements of adjacent properties, recall our shared love for the hand-built houses of Northern California and address the particular restrictions that come from building so close to the ocean.

Built with the insulation on the exterior of the sheathing, behind the siding, the interior looks like the uninsulated summer cabins surrounding it. Using methods and designs from timber framing, we used large doug fir members to create open living spaces in the center of the building. All the lumber was milled to specification by Viking Lumber in Belfast. We used local hemlock to sheath the house and Eastern white cedar for the shingles.

We built the structure over three years, working with a small crew most of each summer and well into the start of winter.