CAROL DE TINE • This Portland, Maine, architect transformed an 1854 carriage house
turned garage turned squash court into a bright, sunny home and studio
arol de tine’s carriage house studio
is tucked away down an intimate service
alley in the West End of Portland, Maine,
a historically fashionable neighborhood of
19th-century mansions and town houses.
The red brick and sandstone Italianate
building, covered in grapevines and set
back behind a grand brick residence
designed by John Calvin Stevens, is so hard
to find that De Tine often walks out to the
street to greet clients and visitors. “Being a C
the carriage house studio has a theatrical entrance, which
architect Carol De Tine (above) created by installing a glass-and-
steel curtain wall that defines the vestibule. The studio floor is
raised two feet, so that it seems almost to be a stage.
big old barn, it’s a very simple form,” says the architect. “It’s a
different scale from everything else in the neighborhood.”
Built in 1854, the handsome carriage house with its great
rusticated quoins is all that survives of Bramhall, the estate of
sugar baron John Bundy Brown that once dominated Portland’s
Western Promenade. De Tine and her husband, Roger
Woodman Jr., occupy the back half of the 6,000-square-foot
carriage house. Her architecture studio is on the ground floor,
where the horse stalls once stood, and the artful apartment they
share with Sasha, a white Maremma sheepdog, is above.
De Tine, a native of Buffalo, New York, and a 1983 graduate of the University of Buffalo’s architecture program, moved
to Portland in 1997 from rural Vermont.
“Portland is a like a smaller Buffalo,” she says, “with its
Olmsted parks and turn-of-the-century architecture.”
The carriage house studio had served previous
