Related Articles

• Pretty in Pink
• On the Homestead
• Extreme Giving
• Big, Easy
• Wintering in Maine

 Comments  Feed

Subscribe to Accent : Accent magazine Web feed Subscribe to Accent : Features

To say that the neglected old dairy farm had seen better days when George “Pat” and Julie Patten first bought it is an understatement.

In fact, it’s hard to believe that the crumbling building pictured in a thirty-year-old photo album is now the same cheery yellow farmhouse they live in today. On the grounds, a transformation has also taken place. Land that was littered with old car bodies, stoves, bathroom fixtures, and other debris is now a sea of green with colorful islands of blooming gardens. But, the Pattens say, their success was not due to any kind of master plan.

“When we bought it, we didn’t have a vision because if we had, we would have turned around,” says Julie.
“I think we had vision,” laughs Pat. “We just didn’t have sense.”

Pat first spotted the 200-year-old farmhouse when he happened to drive down a quiet, dead-end street in Kittery, Maine. Though the house’s condition was poor, he visited again, bringing fiancée, Julie. This time, the house sported a for-sale sign, and the real estate  agent was on the property cutting copper pipes in the basement so they wouldn’t freeze over during the winter. They made an offer, scraped up a down payment, and had a house—and a lot of work—on their hands.

“It was pretty much uninhabitable at the time,” Pat remembers.

The first  job was to make their new home livable beginning in October in time for their March wedding. Inside the photo album titled, “The Great Race,” the young couple can be seen removing asbestos siding, replacing broken fixtures, and sanding wide pine floors, which—along with the historic farmhouse’s charm—had lain hidden for many years.

They finished the necessary repairs in time for their wedding and over the last 34 years have continued to work on the house, renovating when needed, but also adding on, including an addition to the back with wide windows overlooking gardens, a pond, a marsh, and tall pine trees beyond it.

In the process they discovered that the house had more history than they first realized. After they bought it, Pat’s mother invited over Portsmouth librarian Dorothy Vaughn, a family friend and well-known proponent of historic preservation. She said the house was unusual because though it first appeared to be a 1795 center-chimney colonial, upon closer inspection it had even earlier beginnings. The farmhouse had been built around a smaller, antique cape from the beginning of the 18th century.

Pat, who is a boat builder and once owned a boatyard, and Julie, an adult education teacher who is writing a
book on preparing older learners for college, both agree that they enjoy the house’s distinct character. Wood molding and paneling designs change with the rooms, providing clues to the house’s multi-layered history over the last three centuries.

“It just has a personality, and we’ve been here so long we know every little thing,” says Julie.

That personality extends to the outdoors where cultivated grounds reside on the edge of wilderness. When the Pattens first bought the property the once several-hundred-acre dairy farm was reduced to just six acres. Over the last three decades they bought back adjacent land, eventually regaining much of the original farmland. Last year they protected 86 of those acres forever by creating a conservation easement with the town and the Kittery Land Trust.

The protected land, which extends northeast to the York town line and includes walking trails, connects to two other conservation parcels creating 200 continuous acres of protected forest and marshland. It is the largest piece of open public space in Kittery and home to many species of wildlife, including a blue heron and many other birds, turtles, beavers, muskrats, deer, fox, coyote, and moose, to name a few.

Closer to home, the animals include beagles, Heidi and Luci, cat, Mystic, as well as chickens, ducks, and one goose that is now 18-years-old.

“Years ago when the chickens started ripping up my flowers, and the ducks started swimming in the pool, and the geese started chasing the UPS man, that’s when we realized we needed some serious fencing,” remembers Julie.

The farmhouse’s landscaping has also been transformed from overgrown and strewn with trash to picturesque. Stonewalls and neat wooden fences crisscross green lawns and colorful gardens that border not just the buildings but also a swimming pool and tennis courts to the side.

“It was pretty sad,” says Pat. “There was no fencing, no stonewalls, no flower gardens. It was just kind of crumbling.”

Though Julie was new to gardening when they first bought the house, she has learned much through trial and error and by asking local garden centers for advice.
“I never even knew what perennials were. It’s just kind of been a learning process, an evolving process, a growing process, and a fun process,” she says, adding, “If something bugs me I yank it out and move it.”

She says the most gratifying one is a daylily garden containing many varieties and colors. “There are new blooms every day,” she says. “It’s fun and it’s nonstop.” A daylily garden also borders the tennis court creating a blooming backdrop to tennis games.

“Each garden has its own purpose and personality,” Julie explains.

A hillside sloping up from the house to the barn had once been filled with the stones of the foundation of a barn that had burned down before they owned the property. Stonemason Eric Fernandez used them to build stonewalls leading to the barn, which is bordered by an elegant country garden. Russian sage, which Julie says is sometimes mistaken for lavender, waves tones of gray and purple.

Julie’s two garden goals are to keep them balanced and to always have something blooming. “You don’t notice the flowers that aren’t blooming because it’s so full otherwise,” she says. “And just when you think it’s all over, I have nippon daisies that bloom in October.”

Throughout the years, during their work on both the interior and exterior of the house, the couple has had what Julie calls a “complimentary partnership.” Growing up in Ohio, Julie didn’t know a cape from a colonial 34 years ago while Pat, who grew up in nearby New Castle, N.H., and can trace a family history in the area back to colonial times, couldn’t tell a tulip from a daffodil.

“He’s taught me about old houses and tools,” says Julie, “and I’ve taught him about flowers and animals.”