House Crush

How'd You Like to Sleep Here?

We’re crushing on this dreamy Sorrento camp compound.

gabled cottage by Priestley and Associates Architecture in Sorrento Maine
TEXT BY SARAH STEBBINS
PHOTOGRAPHED BY BRIAN VANDEN BRINK

Sequestered at the far end of a Sorrento camp compound, a gabled cottage was designed not for guests, but for their hosts. Linked to the main house by a 15-foot-long enclosed entryway, the annex was, in concept, the highlight of a previous architectural effort John Priestley, of Rockport’s Priestley + Associates Architecture, calls “as exciting as the back side of a refrigerator.” The existing pared-down 1960s boxes, clad in gray-stained boards, seemed to spurn their wooded coastal setting, says Priestley, who applied “a more traditional vocabulary” of roof overhangs, pine-green trim, western-red-cedar shingles, and fieldstone foundations to the buildings and a new guesthouse. A new glass-walled-and-ceilinged entryway delivers the owners to their suite, where 12- and 16-foot-wide sliding glass doors usher in the forest and island-speckled bay and a shingled lantern frames the wavering fir branches overhead. “It feels settled in the woods and comfortable, like it belongs,” Priestley says, and, surely, so do its occupants.