Photographs by Brian Vanden Brink

THE McWilliams family is passionate about houses. They’ve loved them, lost them, renovated, and rehabbed them on both sides of the Atlantic, down under in Australia and Down East in Maine.

First there was the London residence that Jimmy McWilliams’ grandmother owned, until it was destroyed by the Luftwaffe during a bombing raid in World War II. Then there was the castle where Jimmy and her husband, Bruce, lived while working on the Allied de-Nazification program in Germany in the late ’40s. That was followed by an eighteenth-century judge’s house in New York, a farm in Indiana, and three houses — yes, three — that they bought in Stonington, Maine, one busy year.

And today, there is the ultimate McWilliams house — the one that was inspired by the best of all the others. It’s an ele-gant, comfortable, light-filled retreat on the southern shore of tiny Little Deer Isle that the entire family designed together and now calls home. And it’s unlike any other house in Maine. “My husband, Bruce, and I had been coming to Maine since the early 1960s with our two sons,” Jimmy remembers. “We stayed with friends in Oceanville every summer and fell in love with the coast. But we never thought about buying anything here because we were working elsewhere.” Bruce was head of Land Rover North America, a division of the British automotive giant, and also worked with Saab and Daimler Benz.

Jimmy commuted from Pound Ridge, New York, to Detroit for twenty-three years where she worked for General Motors. “Still, the more we thought about Maine and the coast and the plants and animals we all love, the more creative we got, and in 1972 we found ourselves buying three houses in Stonington.”

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Reprinted by permission from the March 2003 issue of Down East Magazine.
Copyright © 2003 by Down East Enterprise, Camden, Maine. All rights reserved.