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Allison Paige

Hello!


My name is Allison and I am a writer living in Portland, Maine. I write about the arts, interior design, sustainability, and human interest.

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DECOR MAINE •

Body of Work: The Art of Bianca Beck

Known for their vibrantly painted sculptures and expressive paintings on wood, Portland-based artist Bianca Beck is wildly accomplished in both mediums. Using the human figure as inspiration, they move beyond mere representation while preserving gestural energy, creating works that complement each other and even seem to collude. Their outsized sculptures, comprised of wire and paper-mâché or fiberglass, feel nearly sentient, muscular, colorful hulks that seem poised to sway or bend or dance, while their frenetic paintings often teem with eyes, fringed lashes fanning in all directions, suggesting a multiplicity of bodies and selves, unbound by physics.

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DECOR MAINE •

Our Souls at Night: Linden Frederick's Meditations on Small-Town America

Observing a painting of Linden Frederick’s, a humble building outlined by the encroaching dusk, one can almost hear the crickets and feel the crisp evening air. For most of his career, the Maine-based painter has focused his creative powers on depicting small-town America. Quotidien architecture—the warehouse, the diner, the shop, take on new life, even an air of mystery, when viewed from his perspective. His nocturnes of homes, particularly, evoke a benevolent voyeurism, where a lone, lit window is the only sign of life.

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DECOR MAINE •

Wild Life: Alice Jones's Paintings Explore the Landscape of Memory

Tennessee-born, Portland-based painter Alice Jones is fascinated with the natural world and the machinations of memory. Her paintings capture expressionistic landscapes, real or imagined. Wildlife and the occasional human figure add sentience or scale, but largely, nature speaks for itself. Dreamlike, contemplative, one senses a mystic’s perspective, a dryad-like intimacy with the hidden circuity of roots, stones, and rivers, a wildness tapped but untamed.

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DECOR MAINE •

Tactile Vocabulary: Barbara Sullivan's Frescoes Are Beyond Words

While fresco is an age-old medium, often murals depicting and commemorating religious scenes, Barbara Sullivan's have contemporary themes with a more playful purpose. She considers each object she creates to be part of an extensive “vocabulary” she may subsequently fit into larger tableaux. If the settings look familiar, her singular perspective sets them askew, animals wander indoors and objects, even people, float, fold, and fragment. Often featuring domestic scenes and household objects in imaginative scenarios, there is a humorous pathos to much of Barbara’s work, a serious artist who refuses to take herself too seriously.

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DECOR MAINE •

PULP FRICTION

Waste not, want not. That wise, old adage is more prescient than ever in these notoriously disposable times. It is a tenant the team at the University of Maine at Orono’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center (ASCC)—a multidisciplinary center devoted to the research, education, and engineering of advanced structures—aims to follow to the letter. In November 2022, the center unveiled the first ever entirely bio-based 3D-printed home. Dubbed “BioHome3D,” the structure is 100-percent comprised of wood fibers and bio-based resins, produced with very little waste.

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DECOR MAINE •

Playing Bridge

As far as impulse buys go, it was a doozy. The first time Dianne Haas, a Boston-based architectural designer, saw the Bridge House, it was a mess. Falling down, just like the song goes about that bridge in London. On her way to Vinalhaven with time to spare, she’d driven past it by chance. “I had a guidebook with me, it said South Bristol: Authentic Fishing Village,’” said Dianne. “I went across the bridge and here is this building, falling apart, with a cardboard sign that said, ‘For Sale.’ A cardboard sign!”

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DECOR MAINE •

Art History

Since the late 19th century, artists have been drawn to Maine, most particularly her rugged isles for their unflinching solitude and unsullied beauty. Monhegan Island (its name means “out-to-sea island” in Algonquin), floating 12 miles off Maine’s midcoast, is one of the most renowned. Captured on canvas by painters such as Rockwell Kent, Jamie Wyeth, and Edward Hopper, it continues to attract artists and their appreciators to this day. Sarah E. Webb is one of them. A multidisciplinary artist with a career woven of many threads—writer, independent curator, and yoga instructor—she first encountered the island the summer of 2005. “I knew from the moment I got on the boat that this island spoke to me in a soulful way,” she remembers. “I had barely walked up the dock and there was something inside of me that said, ‘I don't ever want to leave.’”

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DECOR MAINE •

Angle of Repose

Spied on a snowy day, the home of Scott and Julie Pelletier seems transported from some Arctic clime, perhaps a Norwegian fishing village or a Finnish hamlet. The exterior has all the hallmarks of Nordic design, sleek lines and natural elements, while the interior exudes a beckoning warmth from its many windows—the very essence of hygge. And that is no mistake. The home is firmly rooted in Scandinavian minimalism and expertly rendered by Portland’s Barrett Made.

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DECOR MAINE •

Cottage Classic

When Jim Bilodeau and Lee Marquis started their search for a camp not far from their hometown of Portland, they almost didn’t give the cottage in Rome a chance. Turned off by the Realtor’s photo showing vinyl siding and what looked like a cheek-to-jowl situation with a neighboring building (it turned out to be a garden shed), they almost missed the dwelling’s many charms. Luckily, they persuaded themselves to do a walk-through anyway, and the rest is history. Just stepping inside the cottage took the Auburn natives back to the summers of their youth. Jim was reminded of lazy days on Lily Lake. In fact, the cottage felt redolent of his grandparents’ camp in Frankfort in a way that took him awhile to put his finger on. “I later figured out it was really the smell of mothballs,” Jim laughs. Suffice to say, after a sunny update, the cottage isn’t the least bit stuffy.

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DECOR MAINE •

Home: A Mandatory Closer Look (Quoted and featured)

ALLISON PAIGE, Writer “All my edges have worn off,” Allison says, and it is easy to see in the newfound wistfulness she brings to describing her 19th-century cape on Munjoy Hill and quarantine days spent with her young son. “Writing for Decor Maine, I’ve gotten to tour interiors of all kinds, and each time I see my own home a little differently. Sometimes, it’s as if I’ve returned from a castle to find my own home turned into a pumpkin. Other times, I feel the embrace of a kindred spirit.” Now, like so many others, she finds the space transformed into “a little bit of everything.” A school, an office, a restaurant, a gym, a fort, a hostel. Lately, she and Stellan have taken to drawing their dream homes. “We both like ‘witchy’ houses,” Allison says. “My requirements are a fireplace, a claw-foot tub, and a library tall enough to need a ladder. His are secret passageways, trapdoors, and enchanted chambers. We may never get the exact domiciles we imagine, but right now our home, however imperfect, is a place of great comfort, calm, succor, and yes, shelter.”

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DECOR MAINE •

Great Escapes

For centuries, escape artists have astonished audiences with their abilities to break free of their binds and thwart man-made captivity. Think of the great Houdini himself, shedding winding ropes and chains and maybe even a padlock or two to achieve an exhilarating freedom. Here, we share with you some of our favorite landscape designers, magicians in their own right, who perform similar feats, crafting environments that help us slough off the shackles of our confinements by beautifying our surroundings, expanding the senses, promoting a sense of well-being, and creating, you guessed it, great escapes.

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DECOR MAINE •

Calling Collect

Arthur Davison Ficke, an American poet and aficionado of Japanese art, once said, “Collecting at its best is very far from mere acquisitiveness; it may become one of the most humanistic of occupations, seeking to illustrate … the march of the human spirit in its quest for beauty.” This June, Maine College of Art (MECA) will hold COLLECT, its annual summer art show, giving all interested buyers a chance to try their own hand at this most humanistic of occupations.

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DECOR MAINE •

Nature's Economy

All over Bowdoin College campus in Brunswick you can see classic red-brick buildings. Some of them, like Massachusetts Hall, date all the way back to 1799. But explore a bit further and you will come upon a structure that is totally unique, a cubistic building of glass and wood, at once terrifically modern and organic enough to have sprung up there on its own, like a mushroom or one of the campus’s iconic white pines. It is the Roux Center for the Environment, an edifice that more than lives up to its name. Made possible in part by a $10 million gift from donors David and Barbara Roux, the Roux Center opened in October 2018 and is home to the Environmental Studies program, a coordinate major that encourages students to combine the interdisciplinary focus of a liberal arts education with specializations in environmental concerns.

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DECOR MAINE •

The Descendants

The view from Will and Debby Ethridge’s home in York is timeless: the craggy coast and expansive blue of York Harbor unhindered, clear out to the Isles of Shoals. It is the same view Childe Hassam, the American impressionist painter, captured so faithfully throughout his career. Of the boundless scenery, Hassam once wrote, “The rocks and the sea are the few things that do not change.” Will Ethridge would surely agree. Over the years, this indelible seascape, one his family has enjoyed going on five generations, has changed little. Although Will grew up in Boston and Greenwich, Connecticut, he spent every summer at his grandmother’s summer home in York. His grandmother owned Seaward, one of the august Gilded Age summer homes built overlooking the harbor at the turn of the 20th century. Every summer, she and her family swapped the swelter of Boston for the cool Maine breezes. Since the 1930s, just a couple of decades short of a century, Will’s family has summered on this bluff.

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DECOR MAINE •

Church Revival

Step through the lofty doors of the pre–Civil War era church-turned-home of Donna McNeil in Rockland, and the first thing you notice is a sense of openness and beauty, and the accompanying feelings of serenity and graciousness—all words that could be used to describe McNeil herself. “There’s something that happens when you walk in here, in terms of expansiveness,” she says. “You become lifted and open in a way. It’s not oppressively religious, but it has some spirituality here.”

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DECOR MAINE •

A Marvel of Intelligent Green Design

When Harry Hepburn met Chris Briley, it was synergy. That’s a bit of jargon that gets thrown about recklessly, but here it truly applies. The two began sailing together in the summer of 2012 and found that they made a great team, both on board and off. Briley headed the Green Design Studio of Yarmouth; Hepburn worked at Scott Simons Architects in Portland. Soon after, they synthesized their energies, experience, even their surnames to create Portland-based Briburn.

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Maine Magazine •

The Threat, the Record Breaker, and the Natural

As a child on Long Island, New York, Jack Cooleen played soccer, lacrosse, basketball, hockey, and baseball. He moved to Maine in third grade. In seventh grade, he began to play football, the sport he excels at today and that regularly lands him in the pages of local newspapers. As the record holder for the most receiving yards and touchdowns in Falmouth High SchoolÕs history, Cooleen, in his junior year, was named FalmouthÕs first ever All-State player by the Maine Sunday Telegram. He went on to make All-Conference three years in a row in football, basketball, and lacrosse. The Portland Press Herald called him Ò…one of the few receivers defense has to include in their game plan.Ó Last season he averaged 18 yards per catch and scored 14 touchdowns.

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DECOR MAINE •

Good Wood

ON MOUNT DESERT ISLAND’S SOUTHWEST harbor, Becky Madeira and Grant Castle’s midcentury home nestles on a remote, windswept spot just beside the Southwest Seawall. The cedar-clapboard Deck home and adjacent cottage, once nondescript brown, were painted by the couple a sea-smoke gray. “My idea was to make it disappear, to make it look like a big rock,” explains Becky. The monochromatic exterior looks unobtrusive, even organically appropriate, like a boulder or a tree bent by the north wind. But if the outside looks low and cool, inside it is woodsy and warm.

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DECOR MAINE •

Work of Art

“LIFE WITHOUT INDUSTRY is guilt, and industry without art is brutality,” the 19th-century English art critic John Ruskin once wrote. Anyone who has toiled in a windowless cube staring at one of those bought-in-bulk motivational posters featuring a whale tail emblazoned with words like INSPIRATION knows exactly what he was talking about. For the lucky folks at WEX, a leading financial technology services provider, art and technology come together beautifully at the company’s new global headquarters at 1 Hancock Street in Portland. Recently, WEX collaborated with Liz Moss, of Elizabeth Moss Galleries in Falmouth, and SMRT Architects and Engineers of Portland to curate a selection of Maine art to inspire and motivate in a way those corny old posters never could.

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Deccor Maine •

Step On It

DON’T TELL ALADDIN, but most carpets are far from magic. In fact, the conventional carpet industry is a notorious polluter from toxic runoff during production to installation, when the off-gassing of volatile organic compounds in flame retardants and stain resisters makes it hazardous to indoor occupants. From fabrication to installation to disposal, carpet can be a dirty business, and that’s before anybody even steps on it. Enter Interface. Founded in 1973, the LaGrange, Georgia, company is one of the world’s largest producers of modular carpet tiles. It has since led the charge of what it calls an “industrial re-revolution” to create responsibly produced, Earth-friendly textiles. Account executive Jill Albers details how her company became an environmental catalyst, evolving from detrimental production methods to the cutting edge of sustainable design.

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DECOR MAINE •

The Best Nest

To get the full measure of Erin and Matt Hutton’s 1919 gambrel in Portland, diminutive in size at 1,200 square feet but big of heart, one has only to take a look at the large ruler hanging on their dining room wall. Given to them by Erin’s brother 13 years ago, when their daughter, Emma, was born, the wooden measuring stick shows, penciled at its edges, the heights of many people. “We don’t just take measurements of our family. It’s our neighbors, anyone who wants to do it. They can be part of our family.”

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DECOR MAINE •

A Home for All Seasons

Most of Kate Horgan’s design decisions are made by instinct and intuition. “And I live my life that way, too,” she declares. Kate attended the New York School of Interior Design in her 20s and began designing even earlier than that. “As a child, I think I changed my room every week, this small child moving large pieces of furniture,” she says with a laugh. “My mother couldn’t hang a picture; she couldn’t commit, and it used to drive me crazy!” Her parents bought a 200-bed hotel on the Jersey Shore and gave her carte blanche to design the dining room while still a student—her first project. She later created Darché Designs and has had a hand in designing many homes, her own in particular.

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DECOR MAINE •

Passing the Time

John shows me a clock on the stairs that, while not the original, is a Roxbury tall case clock that dates back to 1820, a time when even Longfellow might have seen it. Longfellow’s poem mused, even then, about the provenance of the building and its past occupants, the children who played there, the new bride, of all whom had lived and died there, and the inexorable passage of time. I find myself wondering in a similar fashion, over the Chases and Henshaws, junior and senior, and of the many people who, over more than 230 years, passed through these rooms.

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DECOR MAINE •

A Lake House Built By Heart

Although from away, Ron Kaufman has spent many a summer in Poland Springs, in a historic 1920s camp on the lip of Tripp Lake, that he and his former wife bought and enjoyed with their two daughters. “It’s a lovely home, beautifully done, but it’s a camp,” says Kaufman. “You have to buckle it up and close it down and put sheets on the furniture. I always say the saddest part of every year is when we have to close it up and the happiest day is opening it up again.”