By Mountains High

There’s a part of Maine, the part where I live, where it’s not Katahdin that is king. No, down here in the Sebago region, Mount Washington looms large. The New Hampshire peak that towers over 6,000 feet above sea level looms on the horizon, blue and stately, distant and domineering. It’s no wonder that artists have been entranced by its form, but it’s not every day that you see a house designed with the mountain in mind.

Yet that’s what Frank Klepitsch wanted to do for his clients, Don and Mary Ellen Patton. The first time he saw the site, it was December, and there was snow in the air and on the ground. “I didn’t think my plane would land,” says the Chicago-based architect. But it did, and he drove out to the site in the dark, spending the night at a house on the neighboring plot.