Location, Location, Location: Mount Desert Island, Maine
July 2, 2004
Getting into Acadia National Park for a hike is less socially stressful. If you
prefer the scenic tour, try a carriage ride on the 51 miles of park-owned roads.
Beautiful public gardens include the Asticou Azalea Garden, near the
Shingle-style Asticou Inn, and the Thuya Garden. The local favorite is the
private Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden, an unusual combination of Asian
artifacts and English landscape planning designed by Beatrix Farrand in the
1920s (appointments are taken for Thursday mornings in July and August;
207.276.5130).
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Tide Race, built by Philadelphia architect George Howe in 1942 for Mrs. Alfred
Greenough, has a private dock and 375 feet of shore frontage. (Click image to enlarge)In keeping with the setting, a premium is placed on historic
architecture. Shingle-style summer cottages date to the 1880s when Boston
architecture firm Peabody & Stearns designed many houses, including Seal
Harbor’s Ravenscleft, which is typical of the genre, albeit with half-timbered
Tudor touches. Priced at $4.5 million with the Knowles Co., the nine-bedroom
home, with 700 feet of water frontage, offers staggering views from its
clifflike perch.
New home construction often adheres to the Shingle-style
aesthetic, including houses designed by New York architect Robert A.M. Stern for
Frederick Bourke of Dooney & Bourke and his former wife Eleanor “Nonie” (of
the Ford family). Southerly, an 18,000-square-foot cottage designed in 1994 by
architect Durand Seay of Alabama, offers 307 feet of ocean frontage and is
listed for $12.75 million with LandVest.
Modern architecture does exist in
this enclave of traditional taste. In 1939, Philadelphia architect George Howe
designed the rectilinear Fortune Rock for Clara Fargo Thomas at Somes Sound.
Nelson Rockefeller hired Wallace Harrison to build the Anchorage in Seal Harbor
in 1941—a modern glass-and-steel house with a semicircular living room. Another
modern beauty, Tide Race, created in 1942 by Howe for Mrs. Alfred Greenough in
Somesville, is only 2,000 square feet, but embraces stunning views of Somes
Sound with more than 375 feet of shoreline. Knowles Co. is listing the property
at $1.3 million. The most dramatic contemporary home is the shiplike house Peter
Forbes designed high on the hill in Seal Harbor.
But most residents prefer
an always-been-here look. On the east side of Seal Harbor’s Ox Hill, David
Rockefeller Sr. subdivided his 60 acres into nine lots of three to
six-and-a-half acres. While four lots have sold, only one home has been built.
Designed by Armand LeGardeur, a New York architect who worked with Stern, the
house belongs to Walt Disney Co. Chairman George Mitchell, the former Maine
senator.
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