On a serene cove at the end of Linekin Bay sits an unassuming dream house. It’s not grand or posturing—three bedrooms, a woodstove in the living room, a dining table scooped up at a rotary sale years ago for $40. It’s well over a century old, and in some places the floors have enough tilt to double as a marble run. And always, against it all, is the sea. Glance up from the kitchen counter and there it is, the water lapping at the stony ledge that juts into the shallows just beyond the lawn, rockweed swirling with the ebb and flow of the tide.
If this place feels resolutely Maine, that’s by design. The homeowner, a mother of four whom we’ll call Ellen (name changed to protect the family’s privacy), was born and raised in Maine. As she built a life elsewhere in New England, the state seemed to be tugging at her sleeve. “I wanted my kids to feel rooted there,” she says. “After years of renting in the area, when this waterfront cottage came on the market—on our favorite street, with a little tidal beach and steps in the rock wall leading down to the ocean for our kids to explore—we knew we had found our spot.”
From the earliest days, Ellen knew this would be a home made for living. Saltwater footprints on the floors and spills on the sofa would be inevitable, and space for the trappings of childhood—not to mention the four children themselves—was a must. “We wanted to maintain the original character of the cottage,” Ellen explains, “but we needed it to be functional for our family of six.”
After a few unglamorous years of tackling deferred maintenance and shoring up the bones of the cottage, Ellen tapped Emily Rand, founder of A Visual Pursuit, to lead the design. “From an aesthetic standpoint it was areal treat,” says Emily, “[Ellen] was influenced by her late mom’s taste, which had a lot of nostalgic charm. I love any opportunity to orient a design around sentimentality or family influence.”
Emily leaned into that nostalgia and nature, embracing the home’s existing knotty pine paneling and calling on memories of her own childhood in Vermont—of homes nestled amid the greenery, where the doors are flung open all summer and kids run in and out barefoot—to inform the overall feel. “It’s a little bit of a departure from the buttoned-up coastal look you might normally see in Boothbay,” she says. “I wanted to avoid grays and whites—the foggy weather will handle that for us. Having warmth in the interiors felt like a nice balance.”
The kitchen design unlocked it all. Emily proposed wood paneling and countertops to create a throughline to the rest of the home, with warm green cabinets and unlacquered brass fixtures. High in one corner, a scalloped brass sconce from Nickey Kehoe feels like a cheerful wink. The pass-through window, with views out to the sea, was Ellen’s addition. “I said, ‘We need an opening right there so we can see the ocean,’” she says. “It was the first thing our contractor did. He cut a big square to let the view in, and we lived with the unfinished opening until we had the budget to complete the kitchen.”
Upstairs, the early choice of a bold Ottoline wallpaper in the guest room helped steer the overarching vision into a palette of blues and greens, says Emily, but avoiding a caricature of a seaside cottage was key. “Blue is a color I sometimes stay away from when I’m designing in Maine, but we pulled it off in a unique way that still feels inviting,” she says. Warm elements throughout proved a vital counterbalance: the weathered wood of a vintage dresser in the primary bedroom, the sunny pop of yellow floors and mustard-colored gingham bedding in the children’s room, hand-dipped speckled tiling on the bathroom floors. In the guest room, Ellen and her sister’s childhood beds—antiques picked out by her late mother, burnished from years of use—anchor the space, bringing a dose of sentimentality and richness.
Throughout it all, livability was paramount, which meant clever uses of space in nearly every room. “I spent a lot of time moving around inches here and there, trying to see how we could make something fit,” says Emily. In the children’s room, color-drenched in Farrow & Ball’s Oval Room Blue, a triple bunk from Maine Bunk Beds and a lofted fourth bed solved the problem of sleeping spaces, with chrome reading lights and checked curtains that turn each compact bunk into a private hideaway. A new mudroom created a drop zone and a sweet window-seat reading nook in one fell swoop, with floor-to-ceiling cabinetry, a row of drawers, and a bench cushion upholstered in a delicate green botanical print.
