'Round Town

Tue, 10/02/2012 - 5:00pm

SUZI THAYER, Register Staff

The footbridge house from a vantage point not accessible by the general public. Courtesy of Pam Burke

The bedroom, on the second floor, is larger than expected. SUZI THAYER/Boothbay Register

The door in the floor was used for bootlegging rum by the original owner. SUZI THAYER/Boothbay Register

The kitchen has hand-built cabinets and modern appliances. SUZI THAYER/Boothbay Register

Pam Burke and Allan Miller after being asked what they liked most about the footbridge house. SUZI THAYER/Boothbay Register

The footbridge house from a vantage point not accessible by the general public. Courtesy of Pam Burke

The bedroom, on the second floor, is larger than expected. SUZI THAYER/Boothbay Register

The door in the floor was used for bootlegging rum by the original owner. SUZI THAYER/Boothbay Register

The kitchen has hand-built cabinets and modern appliances. SUZI THAYER/Boothbay Register

Pam Burke and Allan Miller after being asked what they liked most about the footbridge house. SUZI THAYER/Boothbay Register

"Well, Sergeant? Aren’t you going to say ‘it’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside’? Everybody else does." - Doctor Who

Allan Miller and Pam Burke are just the kind of people you’d expect to live in a house in the middle of a footbridge.

They’re cool.

They met in 1995 in Key West, Fla., where Miller has owned the oldest restaurant in town, Pepe’s Cafe, since 1977. Pepe’s is well known for its fresh-squeezed margaritas, local fish, delivered every morning fresh off the boats, and its signature dish: steak smothered in pork chops. The laid-back atmosphere and the fact that dogs are welcome are no doubt due to Miller’s easy going attitude.

An avid sailor, Burke had been spending summers in Boothbay Harbor living aboard and chartering her Friendship Sloop, the MaryEliza from the Boothbay Harbor Inn’s dock.

After they met, she traveled back and forth between Boothbay Harbor and Key West for 3 years, eventually convincing Miller to come to Boothbay Harbor for a visit. “He fell in love with it,” Burke said, “as well as me, of course.” They bought a house in East Boothbay, where they spent summers, until they purchased the footbridge house a couple years later, in 2001.

Miller, who built and operated the now famous Black Dog restaurant and bar on Martha’s Vineyard before moving to Key West, said he liked the fact that Boothbay Harbor was “rural and not overbuilt, and the people were friendly and down-to-earth.”

Miller and Burke were walking across the footbridge in Boothbay Harbor one evening in 2000 and stopped to get out of the rain under the overhang of the little house. They noticed a for sale sign on the front of the building. A few months later they owned it.

The couple has spent the better part of every summer there since.

Dimensional transcendentalism

There’s a technical term for being smaller on the outside, bigger on the inside. Dimensional transcendentalism. You walk into a little house and find a big house inside.

That’s what happens when you first walk into the little house on the footbridge in Boothbay Harbor. You have an urge to go back outside and walk around the building to confirm that it isn’t bigger than it seemed.

The next surprise is how nicely turned out the space is, with beautiful varnished pine boards covering the walls and fir cabinets in the large, open kitchen. The shiny modern appliances give a surprising spark, and the bathroom with a shower and a toilet that actually flushes, confirms that the plumbing is intact.

All of this is on the side of the house facing the harbor, with big windows that slide open to allow the ocean breezes in. There is a big comfortable couch that looks out over the harbor, with a matching loveseat off to the side.

Then there’s the stairway leading up to the lovely airy bedroom with white paint covering the walls and ceiling, making it bright and inviting. More dimensional transcendentalism. It doesn’t seem possible that this additional room could exist inside the little building.

The door in the floor

And last, but far from least, is the trapdoor in the floor. You don’t have to be a kid to appreciate the allure of opening a small door in the middle of the floor and looking down into the ocean.

The trapdoor was used by the original owner, William Foster, for lowering bootlegged liquor into waiting dories during Prohibition. Miller joked that it is mainly used for fishing now, but has yet to catch one.

And the net that hangs just below the opening? “That’s a grandchild catcher,” Miller said.

Oddly enough, the privacy of the little house is intact. Considering that it is in the middle of a well-traveled footbridge in the middle of the harbor of a summer resort town, it’s hard to imagine how peaceful it feels when sitting on one of the couches or on the large deck over the harbor.

Thanks to the spacious room that serves as Miller’s woodworking shop, separating the living quarters from the footbidge, the couple is able to enjoy their summer home without any sense of being observed by curious passersby.

All in all the place is a gem, thanks to the couple who spent 5 months transforming the weathered, well-used structure into the warm cozy space it is.

Miller and Burke redid the exterior with cedar shingles, and put up all of the interior pine walls themselves. They constructed the fir cabinets and tore up linoleum and tarpaper to expose the floorboards, which were then sanded and restored to their natural state. It was painstakingly laborious work, but it was a labor of love, and it shows.

Burke and Miller are on their way back to Key West, where they’ll spend the winter with their two Australian cattle dogs, Dusty and Blueberry.

The little house is for sale.

The upkeep, combined with caring for their house in East Boothbay, their property in Key West, and their small fleet of classic wood boats, has gotten a little overwhelming. If it doesn’t sell over the winter though, they’ll be back. And that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. They just seem to be the perfect fit for the place.

Before I let them go, I pulled out my notebook and pen and assumed my best reporter facade. “What’s your favorite thing about this place?” I asked.

They looked at each other and laughed.