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By James H. Schwartz

Eye-Popping Color

Artist, author, and entrepreneur Carol Bass painted her Maine island cottage with a palette of intense color.

Walk into Carol Bass' home on a tiny island near Portland, Maine, and you may find yourself reaching for sunglasses. The three-bedroom cottage she built in 1998 with her partner, Bob Newton, is an enthusiastic, unapologetic, and eye-popping celebration of color. "I always tell friends, ‘I didn't just go out and buy boring cans at the paint store.' I found colors in nature that really turned me on and used them all around our house."

photography: Dennis Welch
For the walls of a guest room, Carol mixed her own glaze using paint, water, and water-based polyurethane. "You've got to put a lot of canvas on the floor and move fast," she says. "If you hesitate you're lost." Once the undercoats were dry, she painted the blue swirl pattern on top.

On her dining room walls, for example, she layered two shades of vivid yellow inspired by sunflowers "and that wonderful deep center of a daisy." She washed the walls of a guest room opalescent green, then painted blue twirls "the color of ocean waves" on top. And she finished the walls of the living room a blazing red drawn from summer poppies—a hue that's shaken up more than a few stolid Mainers. "Sure, they're bold tones," Carol says. "But I think colors are like jazz or good cooking: They warm the soul and make you feel alive."

An artist and writer, Carol fell in love with this corner of New England during a lazy afternoon bike ride along the shores of Casco Bay. "The moment I rode over the causeway," she recalls, "I knew this was home. I wanted to build a house here with all of the charm and comfort that people associate with second homes—except I'd live in it year-round." She and Bob eventually sketched out a green-shingled cottage inspired by the lodges Carol remembered from summer camp in North Carolina. Friends who saw the plans called it "a pavillion in the woods"—a description that's stuck. Bedrooms, an office, and a living room fill the two-story part of the house at the western edge of the property. The kitchen and dining room fill the long gallery (Carol calls it "the connector") linking the main house to a 22- by 22-foot studio at the edge of the woods.

photography: Dennis Welsh
Maine Cottage, the company Carol founded with her former husband, Peter Bass, sells a line of furniture including the dramatic red sofa in her living room. She painted the walls a nearly identical shade by building up layers of coral and red paint.

Wherever you look there's evidence of Carol's passion for unusual shapes and colors. Bits of bleached cedar collected during walks along the shore form the balusters on the staircase. (Bob, who's an attorney and furniture maker, joined them with a carved cherry banister.) The fish sculpture hanging near the kitchen window started with scraps of wood Carol found on the road and at a local landfill; she painted and repainted the surface until she had the patterns she wanted. She even put her stamp on most of the furniture in the house, culled from collections she designed for Maine Cottage, the successful home-furnishings company she co-founded in 1988.

photography: Dennis Welch
Carol painted a guest room yellow "because it faces east and looks glorious in the early morning sun." Daughter-in-law Ryan Bass and Luke take advantage of the light. The sewing table's from a flea market.

photography: Dennis Welch
Carol painted the trestle table in the dining room a classic checkerboard pattern. She decided against tinting the scored-concrete floors "because the plain color is the perfect gray."

"Instead of having someone else design my house, I took a very personal approach," Carol says. "I enjoy developing spaces that surprise. That's the reason I painted the dining room yellow—it's warm and rich and surprising." Not that she has anything against white walls: "White can be like fresh air in a space," she admits, "but there are too many beautiful colors in the world to live with only white. The yellow in our house tickles the brain."

The textures and materials Carol used are surprising, too. She chose short lengths of red birch for warmth and color in the living room, but went with wide pine planks in the bedrooms on the second floor in case she decides to paint them one day. In the dining room and studio she opted for heated concrete floors (perfect for Maine winters), which she scored with a bold diamond pattern for variety. With a concrete mixer already on-site, Carol and Bob agreed to use concrete for the kitchen counters, too. "The cement truck came up to the kitchen window and poured it in," she says. "Then we troweled it out several times during the night until the surface was perfect."

photography: Dennis Welch
Bob built the kitchen cabinets and installed the 1948 cast-iron sink, which he found still packed in its original crate. "I asked him to build me the open shelving in the kitchen because I like to look at all our colored bowls and pitchers," Carol says.

Carol's never shy about trying new ideas—and she's emphatically free of conventional constraints. "I grew up in the South," she says, "but not the South of silver candlesticks. I was able to play a little bit more and embrace the fresh spirit of improvisation."

Maybe that's why she and Bob took five birch trees cut from the property and turned them into structural columns on the first floor. ("It seemed like a good idea," Carol says, "and we wanted to reuse whatever we could.") And it's why she dragged two huge slabs of Maine granite up to the door of her studio. The chunks of stone, which also came off the property, function perfectly as steps.

"Pulling things together and trying new ideas—that's my pleasure," Carol says. She's been doing it here in Maine for more than 30 years and she still feels the same way she did the first day she arrived—"as if I've died and gone to heaven."