A waterfront new build, in collaboration with Pat Stone. This is a custom new build on a secluded waterfront lot near Camden, Maine, overlooking the ocean. It was designed for and with Pat Stone, an interior designer I've collaborated with on many projects. When Pat decided to build her own house, she hired me to draw it, and we worked together on both the exterior and the interior the same way we have on other clients' homes. That kind of trust between architect and designer is rare, and it shows up in the result. The site is sloped and wooded, opening to a long ocean view. The house is two volumes connected by a breezeway: the main house and a detached garage. The vocabulary is contemporary modern with traditional New England barn bones. Gabled roofs, a tall stone chimney, vertical board-and-batten siding, standing seam metal roof. Stone foundation walls anchor the lower level into the slope and give the building its name. The view side opens almost entirely to glass. Interior detailing throughout is Pat's. The early design was done in pencil. The colored-pencil studies and the measured elevation both show the same approach: figure out proportions and rhythm by hand before committing them to drawing software. For a custom build like this, on a difficult site, with a client whose own work is in design, that early hand work is where the real decisions get made. It's the project I'm proudest of in Maine. When a designer trusts you to draw the house she'll live in, you take the responsibility seriously, and the work tends to come out better for it.