A View ‘Almost Too Spectacular’ | House for Sale in Brooklin, Maine

Alan Bemis was a lover of Maine storytelling, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the summer house (or rather, two houses—but we’ll get to that) he built on a coastal cliff in Brooklin, Maine, is like something out of one of his tall tales.

An MIT physicist whose research contributed to the development of radar and heat-seeking bombs during World War II, he was proud of his work, if not always how it was used. On campus he was known for being both brilliant and humorous. Bemis’s achievements let him pursue his passions: yachts, planes, and automobiles, including a 1913 Rolls Royce that once belonged to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s daughter.

Bemis fell in love with Maine in the ’20s, when a Harvard classmate brought him on a cruise. Bemis and his wife, Mary, looked at several properties, including the Brooklin house that is now home to WoodenBoat magazine and its boatbuilding school. “They didn’t buy it because it was too formal,” says John Macone, Bemis’s grandson. “They wanted something casual and fun.”

Instead they opted to build their own summer place just up the road, on a 40-acre property overlooking Eggemoggin Reach, the narrow stretch of water that separates Deer Isle from the mainland. “They told the architect they wanted something whimsical,” Macone says. The resulting design was of such scope and size that most of the workers in town were employed in its construction, and both a forge and a sawmill had to be built on-site.

High Head’s seaside cliffs offer a view that encompasses most of the reach’s 10-mile length, a vista that Bemis once described as “almost too spectacular.” And when choosing a name for his coastal escape, he demonstrated both his Yankee practicality and his droll humor. “On old coastal navigation charts,” Macone explains, “you can usually find a spot marked ‘high head,’ a prominent bluff that serves as a landmark for sailors. I guess he figured why come up with a cute name like Sun-Kissed for your summer cottage when it is already on the map as High Head?”

A collector of Maine lore, Bemis would go to the town barbershop every week to hang around and hear the locals tell stories, which he then sought to preserve on his Droll Yankees record label. He also had an interest in early film cameras, so when High Head was constructed in the mid-1930s, he captured snippets of the process on 16mm; the footage is now preserved online as part of Northeast Historic Film’s Alan Bemis Collection.

High Head actually comprises two buildings, which the original blueprints dubbed “the owners’ house” and “the children’s house,” with the latter looking like something out of a Nordic fairy tale. “The concept was that the parents lived in one house and their five daughters lived in the other with a nanny,” Macone says. “And [the children’s house] had the big kitchen and the big dining room with a fireplace, so my grandparents would go up there and take meals with their kids, then they could just go back to their own place”—a smaller house with a master bedroom, a screened sleeping porch, a dressing room, a guest room, and a 670-square-foot party room.

“It is really bizarre,” Macone adds with a laugh. “I guess it speaks to their parenting style.”

Bemis also had an unusual mode of transport to High Head: a float plane, which he would use to fly up from Massachusetts. “He’d pack up the wife and kids in the car, say ‘See ya later,’ then 10 hours later hop in his plane and beat them there,” Macone says. “When I was young, living in Vermont, he would come get my brother and me and fly us to Brooklin. We’d come in low across the water, headed straight for that castle. Then at the last second, he’d pull straight up. It was always just a fantasy world, this magical place that was so much fun.”

But despite having spent so much time at High Head, Macone didn’t fully realize how unique it was until he took over its caretaking and brought contractors in to look at the property. “These are people that work all over the coast, who are used to the Bar Harbor cottages and all these beautiful places,” he says. “They come here, and they are blown away.”

After Bemis died in 1991, Macone initially dreaded the prospect of selling High Head. “It was sad to think of my kids never really knowing this place that had been my family’s touchstone. Everything else has come and gone, but this place has been a constant. Now we’ve managed to stretch it out another generation, which has been great. My oldest got married here a couple summers ago.”

During the 30 years since Bemis passed, however, the elements have taken a toll—it’s tough for any house to stand up to decades of coastal pounding—and the time has come for someone else to tend to High Head. The estate comes with a healthy to-do list, for sure, but what it really needs is new enthusiasm, Macone says.

“Hopefully, there is someone out there who has a vision, who sees this property and says, ‘What a great place to do x, y, or z,’” he says. “It deserves to become something iconic again.”

Spanning 42.5 acres with 350 feet of waterfront, High Head is listed at $3.8 million. For more information, contact Jill Knowles at the Christopher Real Estate Group, 207-248-2048, or email jillsonknowles@gmail.com.