Northeast Harbor
Mount Desert Island, ME

This five-acre site at the edge of Acadia National Park was once the summer home of Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard University and pioneer of the American landscape preservation movement in Maine. Prior to our involvement, the original estate had been demolished and large areas of the site were blasted for new construction. Fragments of a successional climax forest, extremely shallow soils, a degraded stream, and raw ledge, posed severe technical challenges for integrating the program of auto courts, terraces, lawn, and trails for a family retreat.

The project redefines the traditional understanding of landscape restoration, weaving site history with legible design form, structured as a journey down to the water. The design interventions are distinctly modern, but the materials palette and the plant communities remain familiar and indigenous. The result is an entirely restored, thriving, and hardy landscape created on a previously devastated site, created in honor of Eliot’s primitive piece of coastal Maine.

Recognition
ASLA | Honor Award 2017
BSLA | Honor Award 2013

Collaborators
Gwathmey Siegel Kaufman Architects
Pine and Swallow Environmental
CES Engineering Inc.
Atlantic Landscape Construction

Photography
Jon Levitt