Visitors approach the property down a short driveway and enter a courtyard created by the L-shaped house. You can still pick out the original outlines of the Cape, set off from later additions by the fine wooden pilasters that Brook McWilliams originally designed for his house in Australia and were cleverly incorporated here. The farmhouse is large but traditional, with classical trim around the windows, a fanciful line of wooden spruce-tree cutouts applied gingerbread-style just beneath the roofline, and an old-fashioned four-inch reveal on the clapboards facing the cove. Jimmy has planted a colorful assortment of alpine flowers and clematis all around the granite foundations and along the arbor, as well as beside the dramatic dry streambed that emerges from beneath the west wing of the house. She explains that the meadows and woods at Harbor Farm are beautiful and rich in wildlife, but wet. When it rains, or the earth oozes during mud season, waters rush toward the house in a determined effort to reach the cove. It was son Brook who suggested turning this liability into an asset. He proposed building a huge culvert under the foundations, essentially transformingInside, the family struggled to preserve the best of the existing Cape while creating amenities — such as closets — that a contemporary family needs. “I don’t think you can just come along to the coast of Maine and destroy what’s here,” Jimmy says emphatically. Dick and his father completely agreed because at heart “we are Scotsmen,” he says. “We’re scavengers, scroungers, and collectors, and we were into recycling long before it became fashionable.”

When work started on the house in May 1999, Bruce combed the pages of Uncle Henry’s (Maine’s “Weekly Swap or Sell It Guide”), until he was able to locate a fellow in western Maine with 2,000 square feet of pine for sale. “The pine had been sitting in a barn for sixty years, so it was certainly well seasoned, and it included boards ranging from fifteen to almost twenty-eight inches across.” Dick and Bruce bought up all the pine and used it as horizontal wainscoting in the new dining room and vertical wainscoting in the hallway. For the floors Bruce located a man in Ohio who was assembling a hoard of chestnut from the siding of old barns. The McWilliamses purchased all they could lay their hands on, and shipped it to Maine for the dining room and upstairs hall floors.

Though they were forced to rebuild much of the old living room because of poor construction, they struggled to maintain the traditional character of the space. “We took all this original paneling out of here, cleaned it, stained it, oiled it, waxed it, and put it back in,” Dick says. “And because the beams in here were crummy, we found a guy in Bangor who had a barn he was taking down. We bought all the beams, brought them down here, and used them in the living room and throughout the house.”

When it came time to choose materials for finishing the new rooms, the McWilliamses didn’t have far to go. They walked less than a mile from the driveway to the family’s own Harbor Farm store, which started life as a wreath-making venture organized around the kitchen table, and