eowner push her boundaries to find comfort in a small space
February, 2020 | By: Katherine Gaudet | Photography: Erin Little

In 2015, Hannah and Arne Klepinger’s children had left for college, and were starting to think about downsizing from their 3,000-square-foot home in Yarmouth. “I thought it would take a few years. It took a few hours,” says Hannah. The couple looked at eight condos, and the seventh, a compact two-story space on the South Portland waterfront, caught Arne’s eye

Several years ago, when Warren and Kristin Valdmanis bought their first beach house in an exclusive community on the southern Maine coast, “We were advised to tear it down and start from scratch, which we did,” Kristin recalls. “We were young and didn’t see value in all the twists and turns of an old house. We had really young kids, and we needed something that was ultra-functional.” Fast-forward to 2016. Thinking of it as an investment property, the couple acquired another beach home, this one built in the 1890s, about 10 miles south in another exclusive enclave. “We had deep remorse that we had taken down an original structure with so many memories for the people who had lived there,” says Kristin. “We recognized this house had a soul, and didn’t want bad house karma, so we decided to preserve it as much as we could.”