Prud'homme Cottage: bright, private architectural cottage on Mitchell Cove

About Richard

My architect father designed the house as a summer home for my grandparents in 1970. We've been going there and loving it ever since. If you know Acadia at all, you know it's a very special place. And for us, this house embodies the same spirit: it's simple and rugged and historical (built on the foundation of the original farmhouse). And the more you get to know it, the more you appreciate the nuances of its unadorned beauty. I grew up coming here for the summers with my grandparents. We fished and canoed and hiked and gathered mussels and ate lobsters and read books and did puzzles by the wood-stove on rainy days. My parents taught me to love the outdoors on these mountains. And now I'm introducing my own kids to this family-infused spot. I hope someday they'll do the same with their children. I'm a northeasterner through and through. I grew up in Connecticut, went to boarding school in Boston, and college and grad school at Yale. Now I live and work in New York City. I spend my idle moments contriving ways to get back up to Maine.

Richard purchased this House in 1970

Why Richard chose Tremont

It's hard for me to summarize how much Mount Desert, and this house on it, mean to me. The place is a center of my sense of myself and my family. I grew up in learning to know this place; coming back here is communicating with the traditions, memories, and histories that have generated the habits and outlooks by which I know who I am. It really is the case that the *place* binds and holds the spirit together. More practically, I can't think of any other place where it's possible to do so much that's so rewarding so easily. Mount Desert is just *made* for vacationing--for serial enjoying and adventuring in reasonable, daily, family-sized chunks. Everything you'd ever want to do is within twenty or thirty minutes of your home-base; and it's all completely authentic and accessible. We've spent weeks hiking day after day, non-stop, hopping all over the island, never exhausted, always eager for the next pondside vista or rocky scramble or heart-wrenching, ocean-yearning view from the top. Other years we went slower, and spent lots of time tossing stones at the cove, and reading books by the fire, or doing puzzles at the card-table. It's hard to say what's more wonderful: breaking through the treeline atop Sargent Mountain, or wrapping yourself in the fog on the tide-stripped rocks of Mitchell Cove, or reading by the fire with the rain dripping down the pine boughs. The best visits are when you do all three! As a parent of two children, quite young when they first visited, I really appreciated how the activities could be scaled to the age, energy, and interests of the group. It was fantastic at first to have Wonderland available, to make a simple out and back over flat land with an eight and a five-year-old. Or, when they were feeling whiny, to take the Jordan Pond loop trail, with popovers waiting at the end. Now it's fantastic to string mountains together and come home at sunset.

What makes this House unique

I've said it all elsewhere on this site--but I think Mount Desert is just a very special place. I feel deeply rooted in the soil and rocks here. But it's not only because of my family's history. It's what the 19th century “rusticators” and Romantics and trail-builders felt too when they first came here. It's what inspired people like George Dorr to create Acadia Park as an act of spiritual preservation. There's something about the island and its way of being encountered that encourages this kind of bonding. I think the very best thing you can do if you choose to visit is to open yourself up to that whole-hearted connection. And in my opinion, the best way to do that is to find the island on your own terms. That means, preferably, not being swept up into the elements that are part of the tourist pattern. Why be a tourist when you can be at home right from the start? That, for me anyway, is just what you're trying to avoid when you come here. Avail yourself of all the beauties, but do so in your own time, space, and frame of mind. This little house is an ideal anchor-spot for making that possible.