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A boxwood path leads to the front door.

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In Downeast Maine, A Designer Returns to Her Childhood Summer Home

Stefanie Scheer Young weaves her signature sense of playfulness throughout a historic house.

August 18, 2022

One February day 15 years ago, designer Stefanie Scheer Young and her husband—or as I like to call them, my parents—bought a house in Downeast Maine. They’d been watching it on the market for years, and were already familiar with the layout: Big house, little house, back house, barn,” as 19th-century schoolchildren used to sing. Notes on the structural quirks rang familiar, like the way one bedroom’s floors sloped so much that an unattended marble or golf ball would roll itself from one side to another.

The house was the same one where my mom had grown up spending summers, and where my dad had visited when they first met in high school, before my grandparents moved across town. The town and the house looked much like they did then and as they had a 100 years before, save for modern automobiles, motorboats, and some telephone lines.

The living room, painted in Benjamin Moore’s Tuscan Red, showcases artwork of numerous midcentury Maine abstract painters, like William Holst, William McCartin, and George Ortman. Young reupholstered a Sleepy Hollow chair from an antiques shop in Maine with Schumacher’s Pyne Hollyhock.

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  • In the foyer, Young’s husband painted a black Greek key motif winding up the stairs. Young rolled with many of the paint colors from this previous owner: the entry is Benjamin Moore’s Oxford Gold.

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  • Under the antique bulls-eye mirror in the dining room sits a round folding table from a catering supply company, obscured by a custom tablecloth. The dining room is painted in Benjamin Moore’s Mystic Gold, though Young says it more closely resembles the color of a paper bag.

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The process of designing interiors was incremental to an unorthodox degree. For years before my parents had a Maine house to call their own, my mom had been chipping away at furnishing her future abode, amassing items in a maze of boxes in our New York basement. My dad now claims that the Maine house was 80 percent decorated by the time the moving trucks puttered off into the distance. “Everything found a place,” my mom says, “except one set of plates that looked wrong and had to go back to New York.” The final 20 percent of finessing, perfecting, and settling in took place in the 15 years that ensued.

Since my grandparents sold the house in the 1980s, two interim owners had made small, fortuitous improvements. One trained the 100-plus-year-old Dutchman’s Pipe vine over a new trellis, creating a favorite outdoor spot where we now ferry lunch plates and sometimes crack lobster dinners over a makeshift tablecloth of yesterday’s newspaper. Another owner restored the wonderful kitchen fireplace, complete with a beehive oven where we toast marshmallows during winter visits and on chillier summer nights. Otherwise, the place remains much the same. The Adam Federal-style house pulses with history—the familial, the architectural, the literary. Within its walls, great American poems were written, great writers were entertained, and a famed marriage of two literary giants—Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick—once weathered its gusty storms.

  • The chandelier above the kitchen table allows for candlelit dinners. The mantle and the shelves display Young’s spongeware collection, accompanied by a nearby Chinese bok choy wall pocket.

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  • When Young was a child, the Dutchman’s Pipe crawled as a vine up the house. An interim owner built the pergola and trained the perennial to grow over it, creating a shady spot overlooking the garden.

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Under the Dutchman’s Pipe, there’s hydrangea from the garden in a spongeware pitcher and lavender plants inside French marbleized pots sourced from an Atlanta-based antiques dealer over Instagram.

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The 21st-century character of the house embodies my mom’s preternatural sense for play in design. In this case, it seems to stem from the astonishment at the kismet of inhabiting her beloved childhood house once more. Though it’s now more or less finished, the Maine house continues to serve as a muse: The themes my mom has woven throughout the rooms now figure into her forthcoming collection of products, fabrics and wallpapers.

Behind the more formal living and dining rooms sits the kitchen, followed by a playroom, and then, our favorite space: the barn. My mom designed a plexiglass ping pong table—it feels like playing tennis on grass when you’re used to hardcourt—and easily transitions into a generous dining table. Behind it, she installed indoor swings, providing entertainment for anyone with dibs on the next game. Devendra Banhart and Simon & Garfunkel play on the record player. One summer, she let my brother and me splatter-paint the barn floors, and we experienced the idiom of “painting yourself in a corner” in real time. ‘’

Young bought a remnant of the discontinued fabric Chinoiserie Fantastique and worked it in throughout the room: on the headboards, as a line of trim on the bedskirts, and on the back of the antique needlepoint desk chair. The sailor’s valentines above the desk visually rhyme the fabric. A mismatched collection of D. Porthault sheets and antique quilts dress the beds.

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  • Young continues the Chinoiserie Fantastique motif on her grandmother’s chairs. On top of the dresser are two antique brass candlesticks made into lamps.

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  • The black wicker is a nod to the town’s Rusticator period, when the advent of the steamship brought those escaping cities for a rustic getaway into the port.

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In its contemporary form, the house is also an expression of my parents’ collaborative nature. Sometimes I imagine a time-traveling interloper visiting them at age 18 and telling them about how it would all go down: that one day, by a circuitous route, this would be their home, and that they’d know and care a lot about furniture and art. That they’d become shrewd scavengers at antiques fairs and shops, experts in finding good value and unconventional workarounds, and that together they’d collect Boston and Sandwich glass, Victorian spongeware, pink lusterware, Napoli lettuceware, Chinese export china, antique country quilts, vintage linens, old brass andirons, nautical fids, and sailor’s valentines. That after dinner, that they’d sit with their children around the kitchen table, where candle wax drips from the chandelier overhead, and erupt into belly laughter over some silly joke.

  • The barn centers around the plexiglass ping pong table designed by Young, which rests on a base for a Williams Sonoma desk. The $19 lantern pendant buys them time to debate upgrading to a Noguchi.

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  • The Greek key motif continues around the barn’s perimeter in white. The painting is by James Johnson.

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The house sits adjacent to a school on the town common.

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