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38 Columbia Street in Bangor is the home/office combo of architects Kenneth Schiano and Paula Stewart Beall. Passionate advocates of a revitalized downtown historic district, the pair purchased the long-vacant building in 2000 and renovated it over two years while commuting from Eastport. Today, Schiano and Beall's downtown re-creation is a tribute to open design, beautiful woodwork, inspired details, and showstopping views of the Bangor skyline. It's the kind of daring place you'd hope for from two architects let off the leash.
In describing the journey from old four-story building to jazzy townhouse, Schiano starts with what he and Beall did not do to the property. No hung ceilings to conserve heat. No chopping up the landscape by adding hallways or closets. "The only design principle we brought into this was open space," Schiano says. By taking cues from the building's bones-its size, detailing, natural light sources, layout-they tried to "let the building communicate to us what it needed."
Apparently, the building wanted to be-come an expansive yet cozy urban space full of more tasteful surprises than a Sunday Dim Sum. The surprises start when you enter Schiano and Beall's second-floor studio-through a screen door. "It's friendlier than a solid door," Beall says. The bathrooms on each floor are a reincarnation of the building's elevators. (When the bathroom is occupied, the original "In Use" button lights up.) A large living room platform, a sort of sunken living room in reverse, puts the city view on a literal pedestal, running nearly from floor to ceiling.
And what a view. Moving from the third- floor living room to the fourth-floor bedroom adds additional downtown landmarks into the mix. Those who take the dare to climb up to the roof are rewarded with a 360-degree smorgasbord of historic buildings, church steeples, waterfront vessels, and a vantage point that reaches all the way to Peaked Mountain in Amherst.
In a sense, the architects' move to Bangor is a return to their city roots. Schiano and Beall came to Maine together two decades ago from New York City. Educated at prestigious schools-Beall graduated from Pratt Institute, Schiano from The Cooper Union-they worked on impressive projects like the HBO Technology Center (Beall) and the Swedish Consulate (Schiano). After 17 years in NYC, however, they decided it was time to leave the city. So they teamed up as QA13 Architects and moved to the outermost edge of the United States: Eastport, Maine.
Schiano and Beall stayed in Eastport for 18 years, "making friends and solving problems," as Schiano puts it, on a menagerie of Maine projects-from historic church restorations to science laboratories. When their Columbia Street townhouse was complete enough to move into in 2002, many Washington County residents were sorry to see them go.
"Everyone in the area knew Ken and Paula," says Carol Bryan, founding member of the Eastport Land Trust. In the early '80s, they became well known in the community through their work in the conservation of Shackford Head in Eastport, a 90-acre peninsula purchased during an early round of funding from Lands for Maine's Future.
Preserving treasures is a recurring theme for Schiano and Beall. "On their last project in Eastport, they saved a building everyone else had written off," Bryan says, "restoring architectural details and retrofitting the back barn into a brick oven bakery and artist's studio." Currently, they are involved in the restoration of the Eastport Savings Bank for the Tides Institute Museum. While they're missed in East-port, "their choice of Bangor is a perfect match for a city on the cusp."
When QA13 Architects decided it needed to move to a city in order for the business to grow, fans of downtown Bangor can be grateful its owners did not choose the Big Apple. Instead, Ken Schiano and Paula Stewart Beall fell in love with a peach of a building on Columbia Street, and are enjoying the fruits of their labor for "the most adventuresome clients we've ever had." Themselves.
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You can view more of Ken and Paula's work at www.qa13.com.
