The Sleeping Porch: Designer Brendan Ravenhill’s Summer Escape in Maine
Photography courtesy of Ravenhill Studio
Lying in bed in what Brendan Ravenhill calls his “seasonal cave,” you can see the stars and watch the fireflies in July and the meteor showers in August. During the year, Ravenhill runs a busy design studio in LA specializing in minimalist, handmade lighting; in the summer, Ravenhill and his wife and their young son relocate to Islesford, on Little Cranberry Island in Maine, where he has been summering since he was a little cranberry. Today, we’re taking a look at one of Ravenhill’s summer projects, a sleeping porch on the forested edge of the old ice pond on his family’s property.
After several summers of being crowded out of the main house and sleeping in a tent, Ravenhill decided to build a permanent structure for his family of three.
The structure went up over the course of two weeks with the help of several handy friends.
A cattail marsh edges the pond.
Except on stormy nights or “when the rum punch is too strong,” the family of three sleep here throughout the summer.
The timber-framed structure is sheathed in rough sawn pine with a corrugated metal roof and a foundation of pressure-treated posts on dry-laid fieldstones.