146 States Point Road, Saint George, ME 04860

Set on a granite pier at the edge of Tenants Harbor, this 3-season cottage became the place one local family measured the year by. Each spring they returned and stayed through fall. The youngest among them learned to swim here, right off the granite, and the late-summer sunrise over High Island became the image that carried them through winter. Long before the house was here, the granite pier served another purpose: stone quarried here was shipped into the wider world, prized for its strength and dependability. In time, the pier became another kind of foundation, holding decades of life on Long Cove and Tenants Harbor. The house is deliciously unselfconscious, a true Maine cottage in the old sense—rustic, unfussy and deeply comfortable, with very little standing between daily life and the ocean outside. Its design was deliberate, but time is what made it precious and has given this place made of wood, glass, metal and granite a patina no architect could have planned. The Atlantic...