How to Live with History

In Downeast Maine, a rare 1960s home by local icon Emily Muir gets a shipshape renovation.

- Kathleen Hackett

Maine summers are mythic, its coastal cottages perhaps even more so. There are the shingled behemoths built by 19th-century rusticators, Greek Revival captain's houses clustered in seaside villages, and simple fisherman's shacks strung along the ocean's edge. None of them interested Carolyn Evans as she scrolled through rental options from her Charleston, South Carolina, kitchen in the spring of 2020. "We'd never been to Maine, but friends had moved there to escape the Southern summers, and we were feeling that heat," says Evans, a psychotherapist and author. Those friends happened to be Bill Bowick and David Bouffard, an architect duo who knew exactly what she and her husband, Ray, wanted. The couple had recently traded in a traditional 1840s Charleston "single" for a 1950s midcentury home, all angles, glass, and brick, with an open floor plan. "I just love a straight line," Evans says she realized. "I have a hard time living with a curve."