By Sarah Stebbins
From our April 2025 issue
In Maine, large swaths of untouched land, coupled with a strong Yankee independent streak, have lured generations of hardy souls to build homes off the grid. Now, rising electricity costs are sparking renewed interest in the lifestyle. We caught up with eight intrepid homeowners living self-sufficiently in remote spots — and getting a charge out of producing their own power, sometimes blissfully unaware when the world around them goes dark.
Offshore Escape
Photos by Greta Rybus, from Remodelista in Maine: A Design Lover’s Guide to Inspired, Down-to-Earth Style (Artisan)
The couple augmented the ledge with native plants, such as asters, echiums, grasses, and milkweeds. Tenants Harbor builder Fred Mazzoni crafted the pine sofa, upholstered with indigo linen from Vinalhaven’s Marston House, which also supplied the dining area’s directors’ chairs.
Deserted Island
Twenty-six years ago, Fiona spotted a listing for an uninhabited private island in the window of a midcoast real-estate office. She’d been looking for a farmhouse, but the aerial shot of an 11-acre spruce-covered speck in Penobscot Bay captivated her, so she motored out to see it. Ledgy and heavily forested, “it wasn’t an obvious asset,” says Fiona (who asked that her surname and the island’s precise location be withheld), but she bought it anyway. For the next 16 years, she and her two sons made daytrips to the island from their mainland cottage, and Fiona camped there with her cat, hanging a yellow towel on a clothesline to let a friend on a nearby island know she was ok. After she met her now-husband, Tony, in 2005, she told him, “If you want to marry me, you get an island for a dowry.”
Cubic Feat
In 2014, Fiona and Tony fulfilled Fiona’s long-held dream of building on the island. They sought a simple seasonal structure with a hint of drama, telling architect Sheila Bonnell (who has since retired), “take the rectangle and complicate it,” Fiona says. Bonnell conceived an oblong form for the living space flanked by trapezoidal wings — set off with breezeways — that house a studio at one end and a bedroom, half-bath, and outdoor shower at the other. “So if you’re passing through in your underwear on a rainy day, you’re covered, but you’re completely open to the sea and forest,” Fiona says. Clad in ebony-stained pine siding, the cottage looms like a shadow atop weathered mahogany decking that feathers the building into the surrounding granite ledge. Inside, an 18-foot-tall ceiling lends airiness to classic knotty-pine-paneled rooms.
Multipronged Approach
Gutters and pipes divert rainwater from the roof to a cistern, where it is pumped into an attic tank, then into the home’s plumbing. A single 350-watt solar panel connected to a battery bank supplies electricity, and propane powers the refrigerator, range, and a tankless water heater. For high-electricity-use tasks, such as vacuuming and running the dishwasher, and to ignite the water heater for showers, the couple relies on a propane generator. To conserve energy when they have guests, “we condense everything,” Fiona says. “So while the generator is running for the dishwasher, everybody has a three-minute shower.” This summer, they plan to install a rooftop solar array and set of batteries that can handle all of their electricity needs.
Square Feet: 800
Bedroom: 1
Bath: ½
Architect: Sheila Bonnell
General Contractor: Menzeloni Works
Landscape Designer: Patrick Cullina
Electrician: Rideout Electric
Plumber: Haights Piping Co.
Forest Management: Arbor Tech
Equipment Transport: Midcoast Barge Works
Baled Out
Photos by Tara Rice
Spruce trunks, reimagined as posts, returned to roughly where they stood before the couple cleared the land. A favorite pine tree became live-edge windowsills and a narrow pantry door, while a spalted-beech log from the firewood pile was milled into a live-edge kitchen countertop.
Shared Vision
When artist Felicia Cinquegrana Puckett and wooden boatbuilder John Puckett met in 2010, she told him she wanted to start an art camp in the woods. He said she should offer boatbuilding classes, “and I was like, we’re gonna get married,” Cinquegrana Puckett says. They did, and, in 2018, they found a pristine spot to build a home and camp on 43 acres overlooking Sandy Pond in Montville. The couple lived on a sailboat on-site while clearing the land and erecting a shed-roofed timber frame from the felled trees. For the walls, they stacked bales of straw, then encased them in layers of plaster, an eco-friendly construction method that offers superior insulation and saves money on materials and labor. “When we’re gone, 90 percent of this house will compost back into the earth,” Cinquegrana Puckett says.
Roughing It
The couple had always planned to live off-grid. “It just makes sense to make your own power if you can,” Puckett says. But they wound up camping out in the house for years while saving up for utilities. “Every year, we’d go, ‘We’ve got a well, it’s 1822!’ ‘We’ve got lights, it’s 1901!’” Cinquegrana Puckett says. “But stripping away the comforts you’re used to makes you appreciate them more and respect the resources you’re using.” Today, the property hosts a 600-watt solar array and battery bank that powers a well pump, refrigerator, and lights, plus a backup gas generator and composting toilet. Propane fuels the range and a tankless water heater, and a woodstove keeps the place toasty. This spring, the couple plans to quadruple their solar capacity, eliminating the need for the generator and paving the way for a dishwasher and washer and dryer.
Artful Touches
Plaster, which is necessary to protect the bale walls from moisture, lends texture, effecting a massive gessoed canvas for knobby peeled-log posts and beams and curvy live-edge-pine windowsills. In the kitchen, Cinquegrana Puckett created a mosaic backsplash with collected stones that conjures a pebbled riverbank. Large, flat stones form a subtly undulating surface around the sink, whose apron is fashioned from copper pulled off an old cupola. The couple recently completed a metalworking studio on the property, and are in the process of finishing an art studio. They plan to offer classes in both spots, and, eventually, in a boatbuilding shop. “We’ve gotten to the point where we know we can do anything if we just sit down and figure it out,” Cinquegrana Puckett says. “We want to do a TV show called, Eh, We’ll Figure It Out.”
Square Feet: 1,000
Bedrooms: 1
Baths: 1
Building Materials: Lakeview Lumber Co.
Timber-Frame Consultant: Skyview Houses and Barns
Fab Prefab
Photos by Rachel Sieben
The Goodsons customized their ready-made home plan with a stick-built mudroom addition and a seven-foot-long maple kitchen island with a granite countertop. The concrete-slab foundation doubles as flooring, lending an industrial vibe echoed by a chandelier Colin crafted from copper pipes.
Carving Their Own Path
In 2021, Colin and Katie Goodson found their dream property on six wooded acres in Lyman that had repelled other potential buyers. Located at the end of a twisty road, the spot was peaceful, with deeded access to Kennebunk Pond. But there were building challenges, including a roughly 12-foot-wide stream running through the parcel that would necessitate erecting a bridge that could support heavy loads. The plot was also about 1,000 feet from the nearest power line. But Colin, a marine-engineering contractor who works on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, saw an opportunity. “Seeing firsthand how delicate the process of drilling for oil is, how many things can go wrong, made me want to be more self-reliant and not depend on the grid for power,” he says.
Hands-On Homeowner
With input from a professional-engineer friend, Colin constructed a concrete-and-steel bridge to span the stream. The couple selected a ready-made modern farmhouse plan from an energy-efficient prefab builder, and during month-long stints away from the oil rig, Colin worked alongside New Hampshire contractor Mike Ianello to assemble the factory-built wall, ceiling, and floor components on-site. Colin and his dad installed a standing-seam steel roof loaded with 9,600 watts worth of solar panels that Colin connected to rows of batteries with glowing control panels in a mudroom closet that conjures the engine room on the starship Enterprise. Colin estimates the DIY solar setup, which powers all of the home’s systems and appliances, cost about what the couple would have spent to run a power line to the house, “and we’re not stuck with an electric bill that’s going to keep going up.”
Solar Gain
When a storm knocked out power on the Goodsons’ road last winter, Katie didn’t notice. “I was up here, charged and happy, and because the house is so airtight, I couldn’t hear peoples’ generators running,” she says. If there’s a span of cloudy winter weather, the couple might hold out for a sunny day to do laundry, and, occasionally, they use a backup diesel generator. This summer, they plan to build a garage workshop with additional rooftop solar panels that will fill in the household gaps and charge tools and future electric cars. Back on the oil rig, Colin’s coworkers tell him he’s crazy. “They say, ‘Did you lose power yet? Did anything fail?’ And I’m like, ‘Nope, we’re warm, the lights are on.’ This isn’t a competition, but I’m definitely winning.”
Square Feet: 2,178
Bedrooms: 3
Baths: 2 ½
Designer and Builder: Unity Homes
General Contractor: HausWorks
Windows: Logic Windows & Doors
Family Compound
Photos by Erin Little
The Hembergers’ cottage sits on a two-acre lot surrounded by 56 acres of conservation land. Antique railroad lanterns from Greg’s father’s collection decorate the pine-paneled living space, while soapstone kitchen countertops provide “a nice, but not too nice, work surface,” Ben says.
Bonding Experience
When Brunswick’s Ben Hemberger was starting out as a timber framer, in 2002, his first client was his father. His parents, Greg and June, had purchased a 58-acre parcel on Harpswell’s Birch Island, where Greg, an architect, planned to design a seasonal family camp, and he wanted Ben to build it. Greg’s practice was in Vermont, but he made frequent trips to the island during the initial construction phase, helping to install the cottage’s pier foundation and raise the timber frame. “Growing up, I had an on-again, off-again relationship with my dad,” Ben says. “But when we started the project we had a strong relationship, and working together only made it stronger.” Before they could finish, though, Greg died in a skiing accident. “That summer after, I was out there by myself processing his death and building, which was cathartic,” Ben says.
Lasting Legacy
Greg was a sailor and his spirit lives on in the cottage’s nautical influences, including a lighthouse-like tower with wraparound windows that contains a stairwell and sleeping loft, bay- and forest-facing porthole windows, and a compact, efficient interior. Steeply pitched gables offset the tower, suggesting a cluster of unassuming cabins when viewed from the water, while allowing for loftiness in the bedrooms and living space. Inside, a deft layering of woods — pine paneling, pine and spruce on the exposed timber frame, ash flooring, maple cabinetry — reads like a field guide to native trees. “We each lost somebody different when we lost my dad,” says Greg and June’s daughter, Gretchen. “This place provides a way for us to come together to remember him.”
Good Enough
Batteries connected to a rooftop solar array power the pumps in a well and septic tank, as well as the home’s outlets and lights — most of the time. “If we get a stretch of cloudy weather, then you’re getting out the flashlights and lanterns,” Ben says. There’s a propane refrigerator, range, and tankless water heater, but no coffee maker, toaster, vacuum cleaner, washing machine, or Wi-Fi. This summer, Gretchen is considering bringing a portable satellite dish that would allow her to work online and stay for longer stretches. “I have mixed feelings about it because this is our place to escape,” she says. “But also, if I’m going to be sitting in front of a computer, why not do it on an island in Maine?”
Square Feet: 1,400
Bedrooms: 3, plus a sleeping loft
Baths: 2
Architect: Greg Hemberger
General Contractor: Benjamin + Company
