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. The project redefines the traditional understanding of landscape restoration, weaving site history with legible design form, structured as a journey down to the water for a young family’s use and enjoyment. 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
American Society of Landscape Architects | Honor Award 2017
Boston Society of Landscape Architects | Honor Award 2013

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

Photography
Jonathan Levitt
Lauren Stimson
Stephen Stimson