Different Worlds Unite> Distant lands part of new home’s treasures

Most homes are built to accommodate the present and future needs of a family. But for Richard and Anne Collins, building their dream home in Northport meant making room for the past.

After 26 years of traveling and living abroad — all the while gathering mementos, artifacts and antiques — the Collinses last year began building a beachside retirement home that keeps alive the spirit of those distant lands.

Both Maine natives, Richard and Anne Collins for many years looked forward to building just west of Bayside on the 9-acre parcel they bought in 1980.

“For 15 years we’d come here and sit on the land and fantasize about living here,” said Anne Collins recently, while sitting in her living room, where she was surrounded by antique furniture from Japan, Iran, China, Italy and other countries.

With a design that emphasizes open spaces connected by wide portals, the house was alive with midday sun that skipped from the ocean, through the windows and about the rooms. Just in front of Anne Collins was an antique Japanese wooden hibachi, which, with the addition of glass top, she had converted into a coffee table. On the fireplace mantle stood a phalanx of Iranian brass vessels and urns. Perched on end tables were Japanese pottery lamps called imari. Behind her were a wooden chest built in Connecticut in 1799 and a tansu, a chest of drawers used by most Japanese in lieu of closets.

And lying beneath a goodly portion of this international collection is a Persian rug with a design depicting scenes of the hunt. It took three people working three years to complete the carpet. It took the couple four times that many years to get the carpet out of Iran after they were forced to abandon their possessions and flee the country in 1979 as the Ayatollah Khomeini came into power.

Dick Collins, 61, grew up in St. Agatha, where his family operated a potato farm. After attending the University of Maine in Orono — where he met his wife-to-be — he spent most of his career in the global world of life insurance. Dick Collins took an early retirement in 1992 from his position as president of the American Life Insurance Co., which is based in Delaware.

With their two daughters, the couple lived in Bermuda, Lebanon, Iran, Japan and the states — all the while traveling to dozens of countries. From the time his international career began in 1966, Dick Collins estimates that he visited about 100 countries. Wherever they made their home, the Collinses gathered curios and handicrafts to furnish their lodgings. And while the company would not pay to move bulky items such as sofas and easy chairs, it did help the Collinses move a growing collection of “accent pieces.”

The foreign insurance agencies that Dick Collins directed employed mostly nationals. As Dick Collins and his wife befriended many of the local workers, the couple would begin to experience the countries not as tourists, but as guests.

“They took me to places that tourists would never have a chance to go,” Anne Collins said.

Because she is a Belfast native, Anne Collins, 60, always made a point of returning to Maine each summer so her two children could spend time with relatives. “We knew we eventually wanted to re-establish a home here,” she said. The couple also own a condominium in Florida and maintain an apartment in Delaware.

Anne Collins had long been an architecture buff, specifically an admirer of the turn-of-the-century shingle-style house, whose more notable features are a gambrel roof, turrets and wraparound porches. An architectural father of that style, Fred Savage, flourished in this area at the end of the 19th century. Although no formal collection of his works has been published, many of his blueprints for homes are stored at the Damariscotta Library.

Anne Collins traveled to the library and photocopied 20 of the blueprints, each of which had elements she wanted in her home. With the copies she went to Design Alternatives in Belfast, owned by Terry Hire, an interior designer.

“Anne is incredibly sophisticated in her knowledge of architecture,” Hire said. The two designed the new home, even making changes as it was being built.

According to Hire, shingle-style homes often have shingle siding, but it is not essential to the design.

“Its mother was the Queen Anne style,” Hire said, but shingle style often used elements of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, which stressed hand-crafted decorative objects.

“They’re often hunkered down to blend in with nature,” he said of the design. “Many of them were summer homes or even camps, with lots of rambling rooms.”

Anne Collins said many visitors tell her that the house has the look of a much older home than one completed in fall 1997 — a look she was aiming for.

The Collins home has a two-story, full-windowed turret that faces seaward and a wraparound porch along the entire sea side of the home. Large windows line the exterior wall to the porch. Lounging on the porch, the Collinses can look over the expansive harbor to Searsport, five miles away.

If one looks at the bay through the windows of the corner dining room, the wraparound porch takes on the appearance of the bow of a ship.

The second floor holds a master bedroom with attached bath and three smaller bedrooms with a full bath centered among them. The third floor is divided — half serving as an office for the retired executive, half as a storage area for artifacts and antiques too numerous to be placed around the house.

The first-floor kitchen has an island stove that is surrounded by a black-and-white granite countertop. A covered walkway connects the kitchen door with a four-car garage.

Several of the home’s doors and their hardware are antiques that the couple collected from artifact dealers in Maine.

But the centerpiece of the home — and Anne Collins’ most prized possession — is in the wide hall that connects all the first-floor rooms. Attached to the wall and encased in a clear, plastic case is a 20-foot scroll from Nangjing, China.

“Everything else paled when I got this,” Anne Collins said. The painting on the cloth parchment was begun by a father and, after his death, completed by his son.

The foot-high scroll depicts a market day in China in incredibly minute detail. Although encased, the scroll can be rolled so that its entire scene, depicting hundreds of people, can be viewed — from the driver urging his oxen team forward, to the fishermen in the bay with their finely webbed nets. The exotic scene is mesmerizing in its intricacy and, for some moments, one is fully swept away to a foreign land.