Modern Design Lovers: Here’s Your Dream Home

We’re crushing on this artful beachfront retreat.

On a sandy southern Maine beach, a family’s glass-front summer retreat rises like a magnificent modernist dollhouse amid more traditional cottages. Designed by Falmouth architect Carol Wilson, it hinges on a partially exposed tubular-steel skeleton, “which is like a timber frame, but with narrower steel components,” says Geoff Bowley, whose Kennebunk firm, Bowley Builders, headed up the construction. The slimmer structural steel, along with a flat roof, allowed the team to stack three floors while complying with shorefront height restrictions. Custom glazing from Vassalboro’s Duratherm Window Corporation — scarcely interrupted by cable railing on the upper deck — overwhelms the painted cedar cladding on the southern façade, suffusing the home with light and ocean views. Decorating honors went to celebrated New York designer Anthony Baratta, who, one imagines, must have taken childlike delight in furnishing the luminous, exposed rooms.